Historically speaking, he’s even a bigger deal than you may think.
On June 16, it will be nine years to the day since Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator in the Manhattan tower bearing his name and announced his candidacy for president of the United States. During those nine years, his name and image have dominated not just American political discourse but the entirety of American culture, and even world culture, in a way that may well be without precedent in the entire history of the Republic. Yes, the name and image of Franklin D. Roosevelt loomed over the country during his twelve years in office, just as the name and image of Abraham Lincoln were ubiquitous during his four-year presidency. But FDR’s centrality was wrapped up in the Great Depression and, then, World War II, and to think of Lincoln is to think, first and last, about the Civil War. By contrast, Trump’s predominance is in one sense just about Trump himself – Trump as symbol – and in another sense about something even larger than the colossal historical events associated with FDR and Honest Abe. Trump didn’t become iconic by presiding over an economic crisis or prosecuting a major war; he became iconic by doing something that no president before him had ever done: he took on the establishments of both major political parties, told some harsh truths about the ways in which those establishments had betrayed the American people and their Constitution, and rooted his presidential campaigns, and his entire term in office, in a determination to restore to the people the kind of government that the Founders had intended. In doing so, he also became an emblematic figure for people around the world whose own governments were betraying the freedoms on which they had been founded.
