WASHINGTON (AP) – The most unlikely of president, Donald Trump has reshaped the office, shattering ancient norms and traditions while dominating national discourse like no other.
Trump, ruling by whim and tweet, deepened the country’s racial and cultural divisions and undermined belief in his institutions. His legacy: a tumultuous four years marked by his deposition, failures in the worst pandemic in a century and his refusal to accept defeat.
He shattered notions of how presidents behave and communicate, commanding both plain thoughts and policy statements, opening the curtain on the American people, while enrapturing supporters and nerve-racking enemies – and sometimes allies – at home and abroad.
While the nation would be harshly oppressed to choose another figure as disruptive as Trump, it remains to be seen how much of his mark on the office itself, occupied by just 44 other men, will be indelible. It already outlines the work of his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, who viewed his candidacy as a rejection of Trump, offering himself as an antidote to the chaos and dissent of the past four years, while pledging to restore dignity to the Oval Office.
“For four years now, this has been someone who has tried at every opportunity to push presidential power beyond the bounds of the law,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “He changed the presidency in many ways, but many of them can be put back almost overnight by a president who wants to make it clear that there is a change.”
Perhaps Trump’s most enduring legacy is his use of the presidency’s attributes to undermine Americans’ views on the institutions of their own government.
From his first moments in office, Trump launched an attack on the federal bureaucracy, taking a suspicious look at the career officials he considered the “ Deep State ” and shaking Americans’ confidence in officials and the levers of the government. Believing that the investigation into Russian electoral interference was a crusade to undermine him, Trump went after the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department – calling leaders by name – and later released broadly against the man who led the probe, respected special counsel Robert Mueller.
His other goals were many: the Supreme Court for insufficient loyalty; the post office for handling post-in ballots; even the integrity of the vote itself with its baseless claims of electoral fraud.
“In the past, lost presidents were always willing to hand over the office to the next person. They were willing to accept the voice of the American public, ”said Richard Waterman, who is a presidency student at the University of Kentucky. “What we are seeing now is, in fact, an attack on the institutions of democracy.”
Current polls show that many Americans, and a majority of Republicans, feel that Biden was elected unlawfully, which erodes his credibility while running during a crisis and also creates a template of deep suspicion for future elections.
“That’s cancer,” said Waterman. “I don’t know if the cancer can be removed from the presidency without harming the office itself. I think he’s done tremendous damage in recent weeks. “
Threatening the peaceful transfer of power was certainly not Trump’s first attack on the traditions of the presidency.
He did not release his tax returns or divest from his businesses. He distributed government funds on a partisan basis and undermined his own scientists. He angrily tweeted to members of his own party, using government property for political purposes, including the White House as a backdrop for his acceptance speech for his reappointment.
Trump used National Guard troops to clear a largely peaceful protest in front of the White House for a photo op. He appointed a secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, who needed a release from Congress to serve because the retired general had not been without uniform for all the seven years required by law. In that one example, Biden has followed Trump’s lead and been nominated for retired Pentagon General Lloyd Austin, who also needs a waiver.
Trump’s disruption has also spread to the world stage, where he cast doubt on once inviolable alliances such as NATO and bilateral partnerships with a host of allies. His America First foreign policy was based more on preconceived notions of past shortcomings than on actual facts on the ground. He unilaterally drew troops from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Syria, drawing double fire each time to undermine the purpose of the US deployment.
He withdrew from multinational environmental agreements, an action that scientists warn may have accelerated climate change. He moved away from deals that curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, if not regional malice.
And his presidency can be remembered for perhaps permanently changing the nature of the relationship between the US and China, diminishing hopes for a peaceful rise of China as a world power, and laying the foundation for a new generation of economic and strategic rivalry.
While historians agree that Trump was a unique figure in the office, it will be decades before the ramifications of his tenure are fully known. But some pieces of his legacy are already there.
He appointed three Supreme Court justices and more than 220 federal judges, giving the judiciary an enduring conservative tendency. He reversed regulations and oversaw an economy that boomed until the pandemic hit. His presence raised the turnout – both for and against him – to record highs. He received unshakable loyalty from his own party, but quickly put aside anyone who displeased him.
“President Trump has been the person who has returned power to the American people, not the Washington elite, and preserved our history and institutions while others have tried to tear them down,” said Judd Deere, spokesman for the White. House. “The American people chose a successful businessman who promised to go to Washington, not to tear it down, but to put them first.”
At times, Trump acted like a spectator of his own presidency, opting to tweet alongside a cable news segment rather than delve into an effort to change policy. And that was one of the many ways Trump changed the way presidents communicate.
Carefully crafted policy statements faded into the background, replaced with tweets and ready-made comments to reporters about the buzz of helicopter blades. The discourse became hardened, with swear words, personal insults, and violent images infiltrating the presidential lexicon. And there were the falsehoods – more than 23,000, according to a Washington Post census – that Trump threw out with little regard for their impact.
It was that lack of honesty that played a role in his defeat in an election that turned into a referendum on how he dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now killed more than 300,000 Americans.
Day after day in his reelection campaign, Trump defied health guidelines and addressed crowded, largely mask-free crowds, promising the nation would “walk the corner” with the virus. He admitted that he wanted to downplay the seriousness of the virus from the start.
He held superspread events at the White House and contracted the virus himself. And while his administration was in charge of Operation Warp Speed, which helped produce coronavirus vaccines in record time, Trump also undermined his public health officials by refusing to embrace the wearing of a mask and proposing unproven treatments, including the injection of a disinfectant.
“We have seen that Donald Trump’s style was one of the factors that contributed to his failure as president,” said Mark K. Updegrove, presidential historian and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. “His successor may consider his presidency a cautionary tale.”