The Ultimate Trump Legacy: Corruption

A Historian's View From 2076

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In the 2021 C-Span ranking of Presidents, Donald Trump came in as the third-worst President in history, tied with Franklin Pierce. The only two more lamentably lame presidents, according to the Presidential historians involved in the rankings, were James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.

This judgment was based solely on Trump’s first term. We will have to wait for the next round of rankings to include the impact of Trump’s disastrous second term. Poor Andrew Johnson might finally receive some consolation at no longer being ranked dead last.

The C-Span rankings are not arbitrary. They are based on the following ten categories of Presidential leadership:

Public Persuasion

Crisis Leadership

Economic Management

Moral Authority

International Relations

Administrative Skills

Relations with Congress

Vision / Setting an Agenda

Pursued Equal Justice For All

Performance Within the Context of Times

Using this criterion, it is no wonder that the top three Presidents are consistently the same: Abraham Lincoln (1), George Washington (2), and Franklin Roosevelt (3). For all of Trump’s self-promoting delusions about being the greatest President “ever,” historians have a very different and much more accurate view.

However, the process of historical interpretation, especially for something like Presidential rankings, requires a temporal perspective. Given that we are only in the second year of Trump’s second term, it is premature to give a final ranking for his presidency. That will be the work of future historians.

So, what will historians in the year 2076 think of DJT? Using the C-Span criterion, I cannot imagine his position will improve very much, unless there is an even bigger train wreck of a President yet to be elected.

I will make a prediction, however. Historians in the future will focus on one overriding issue to assess Trump’s place in history. It won’t be his middle-of-the-night memes, his invasion of Venezuela, or his impulsive war with Iran. Nor will they focus on the doomed tariff policy or his weaponizing of the Department of Justice to punish his opponents, whom he publicly states that he “hates.”

As significant as these disastrous policies are, here is what I believe future historians will highlight as the major impact of the Trump years: the systematic erosion of constitutional norms through the normalization of corruption, personal rule, and the subordination of public institutions to private loyalty.

In other words, Trump’s legacy will be the complete and total corruption of the office of the President.

Future historians might argue that Presidents come and go, ideologies rise and fall, economic programs reverse, and foreign policy doctrines collapse. But corruption leaves institutional scars that persist for generations because it alters expectations about power itself.

I can imagine that historians in 2076 will examine what the Trump years taught Americans about their system of government. Those lessons will include that law enforcement could be politicized, that conflicts of interest no longer mattered, that public office could openly enrich private actors, that loyalty to an individual superseded loyalty to institutions, that constitutional restraints depended entirely on voluntary compliance, and that a large portion of the public would tolerate nearly any abuse if politically advantageous.

That is historically devastating because constitutions are ultimately cultural agreements, not self-executing machinery.

A future historian would likely argue that the greatest danger was not the breaking of laws alone, but the destruction of the expectation that leaders should be constrained by law. That distinction is enormously significant. Every republic experiences corruption. The deeper crisis occurs when corruption ceases to shock the public and becomes a new norm.

I can anticipate that a future historian might write that by the late 2020s, Americans had become so saturated with scandal that what was considered the abnormal had lost its power to alarm. Constitutional violations no longer produced national crises but merely accelerated partisan shouting and sorting. The erosion of outrage became itself a symptom of democratic decay.

The Trump era exposed how fragile governmental norms were. Trump will be remembered for his disrespect for independent courts, his hyper-political law enforcement, the end of the peaceful transfer of power, massive conflicts of financial interests, and a reconstruction of unlimited personal patronage.

Ultimately, he will be the president who destroyed the one historical and most important norm in US history: the understanding that no individual stood above the law. Trump has changed that calculus. Trump proved that there was one person in the American system who stood way beyond the rule of law: Trump.

Historians may not focus so much on any particular scandal of the Trump years, although there will be plenty to examine. They will be more interested in viewing the Trump scandals as a system…not as individual indiscretions.

Trump institutionalized corruption as a policy of presidential leadership.

Whether it be profiteering pardons, weaponizing the Justice Department, attacks on inspectors general, the monetization of political influence, family enrichment, loyalty tests, or the refusal to accept electoral defeat, historians will weave these into one coherent historical narrative. Not isolated controversies, but one system of overwhelming and devastating corruption.

Our future historians might also compare Trump’s corruption to earlier eras of scandal. They will compare the Trump era to earlier American periods where corruption hollowed institutions:

The spoils system before civil service reform, Gilded Age machine politics, Watergate, McCarthyism, and perhaps the collapse of Reconstruction under the weight of southern corruption and violence.

But the distinction they will make is that previous crises usually produced reform movements that reaffirmed constitutional boundaries and norms. The American system of governance allowed for Constitutional corrections and reforms.

They may conclude that the Trump era was different because millions of Americans came to see constitutional restraints themselves as obstacles to political victory. Future politicians no longer viewed the Constitution as a guardrail but as a turnstile to jump over at will.

But historians might also point out the psychological damage caused by Trump’s corruption. Americans ceased to believe that the government existed as a neutral public trust. Trump taught citizens that all institutions are corrupt, all prosecutions are political, all elections are manipulated, all media are propagandistic, and then the corruption became self-justifying. Because if everyone is corrupt, then corruption no longer disqualifies anyone.

That is how republics decay culturally before they decay formally. The Trump era’s enduring significance lay instead in the normalization of conduct once considered fundamentally incompatible with constitutional democracy.

Hopefully, the constitutional order will survive formally, but it will emerge transformed, less restrained, less trusted, and more vulnerable to personalist politics.

I believe future historians will conclude that the Trump era did not destroy the American constitutional system outright. More consequentially, it habituated millions of Americans to its degradation. The lasting legacy was not a single constitutional crisis or scandal, but the normalization of permanent constitutional erosion.

One more prediction:

Should a future president come along who can repair the damage caused by Donald Trump… that individual may find themselves at the top of the C-Span list very quickly.

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