What I Learned When Trump Tried to Correct the Record
As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”
I am the editor of a scholarly history of Trump’s term in the White House, the third book in a series about the most recent presidents. A few days after , Trump’s then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me—something, Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency.
