The evidence of Trump’s ignorance, stupidity, lying, narcissism, greed, corruption and cruelty is so ubiquitous just now, that there seems scarcely any point in adding to it. So I’m not going to; even after just having finished reading Mary L Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough (2020), which has dozens of examples, plus some credible explanations for them all – of which ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad’ (©Philip Larkin) is one – but doesn’t include his latest – post-2020 – grotesqueries.

Instead, I’m more interested in the wider significance of all this idiocy. In short:  how is this one man’s madness affecting the US’s present conduct and ‘place in the world’? Or does it simply reflect them? These are questions that historians are used to grappling with for earlier periods – viz the endless controversies over the ‘Great Man Theory of History’ – but obviously should be directed at current issues too.

Of course they are connected. If Trump is not reflective of present-day America, which is – let us say – essentially and historically more liberal and ‘democratic’, then he is clearly imposing his stamp on it, or trying to, in order to change it. If on the other hand he is only representing a trend or trends that are or were already present, it follows that he’s not so instrumental – and hence not quite the ‘great man’ he obviously thinks he is.

Which of these is it? A bit of both, I think. I remember that one of the books we were set when I studied American history at university in the early 1960s was called The Great Experiment, by Frank Thistlethwaite (who may have been one of our tutors). That expressed the more liberal view of the US’s origin and development from 1776 onwards, albeit acknowledging its occasional backslidings – slavery, for a start. But might not those backslidings represent the true history and character of the country more closely than Ronald Reagan’s ‘shining city on the hill’ (©John Winthrop) metaphor? It’s not only slavery, of course, but also the genocide of the native Americans, the ‘Wild West’ image, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, the Mafia, anti-intellectualism, corruption, My Lai, and – I would say – the evils (as well as the benefits) of unrestrained capitalism. You could build a whole picture of the present-day USA out of these sorry historical characteristics; just as you could characterise Britain, equally one-sidedly, in terms of its participation in the slave trade, class-ism, poverty, imperialism, and plastic St George’s flags tied to lamp-posts. Past errors (as I regard them) are not confined to America.

The question, however, is the extent to which those evils already typified the US when Trump came along. My impression – and I’ve lived and taught there – is that they were still strong and widespread, especially among Republicans, and among Trump’s beloved ‘poorly-educated’. (See https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/origin-of-trump-quote-i-love-poorly-uneducated-people-1d912c.) They’re obviously very numerous – I’ve been told 80 million? – judging by the popular majorities he won in the Presidential elections of 2016 and 2024. (And that of 2020, if you believe his conspiratorial version of events.)

During his two terms in office he has done his utmost to tailor the popular view of US history to his own liking, by his onslaught on those libraries, museums and universities that are deemed to present more ‘wokeish’ versions: censoring ‘Black History’, for example, and exonerating Confederate generals. One is reminded of George Orwell’s prediction – or warning – in 1984: ‘the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth’. That’s what Trump’s side in his notorious ‘culture wars’ is driving towards, and might become reality; if, that is, his authoritarianism is not held in check. As it might be; and possibly as soon as this coming November, if voters turn against him in the ‘mid-terms’, and the current that has been carrying him thus far gives way to the more democratic – and Democratic? – American alternative.

In itself this doesn’t settle the question of whether he is affecting or merely reflecting the current course of American history. The obvious answer to that is that he clearly represents some major trends and characteristics in that history, and particularly in the ethical values of late-stage capitalism he so perfectly represents, which probably would probably have continued to flourish without him; albeit without his distinctive stamp. Whether this makes him an essentially ‘instrumental’ historical figure is still up for discussion. My profession will be arguing over that for years.

Otherwise future judgments of him will also rest on estimates of his character, most of which currently look like being pretty negative, and may become more so after the remaining ‘Epstein’ files have been released. Whether or not this would much matter to him, when set against his life-long ambition to be rich and famous regardless, which of course he has achieved in spades, seems unlikely. His Dad, in the course of ‘fucking him up’, probably saw to that.