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Satan's Plaything
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How historians view Trump – and how Trump sees himself
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-view-historians/?ftag=CNM-00-10aag7e
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-view-historians/?ftag=CNM-00-10aag7e
There's at least one thing that Donald Trump's critics and supporters can agree on about his presidency, according to Jeffrey Engel,
director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University: "He came in to be a disrupter, and of all of his accomplishments,
I think it's very easy to say that he accomplished that one."
Engel is one of a group of historians from leading universities
around the country who convened via Zoom last March.
Their mission: assessing one of the most unusual presidencies in
American history.
During the call, Timothy Naftali of New York University
remarked, "His concept of a national interest was identical
with his concept of his own interest."
Daniel C. Kurtzer, of Princeton University's
School of Public and International Affairs, said, "Trump inherited
a mess. It was not that he created a mess; the Middle East was
in very bad shape."
Julian Zelizer of Princeton assembled the panel,
which will soon publish a book of essays on Mr. Trump's
time in office – a presidency he described as "one of the
most unstable, unconventional.
"One thing that historians who've lived through the
moment have, that historians 200 years from now
won't have, is a sense of what it felt like to live in
the moment," Zelizer told correspondent Rita Braver.
It will be the third volume in a series which offered mixed
assessments of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
But unlike his predecessors, former President Trump requested
to meet via Zoom with the historians.
They shared a video of that July session with "Sunday Morning."
"I have great respect, and I thought of you writing a book,
it would really be nice if we had an accurate book," Mr. Trump said.
He touted his building of at least part of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico
("We did a great job on that, and we got, we did a very, we did the wall that Border Patrol wanted").
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