Trump, To Presidential Historians: "I Didn't Win The [2020] Election"

What I Learned When Trump Tried To Correct the Record
The former president made an unusual effort to influence how historians will view him.
Julian E. Zelizer, The Atlantic, April 4, 2022 (my emphasis)

. . . 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 The New York Times reported on the project, Trump's then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me . . . For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time—more than any other ex-president that we know of—trying to influence the narratives being written about him. . . . According to Axios, Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency. . . .

[O]ur conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweets—because the former are more elegant and lengthier—he sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.

The former president sat at a wooden desk in his Bedminster Golf Club with an American flag beside him. . . . Many of Trump's anecdotes came back to how he had talked—or intimidated—powerful actors into doing things that no other president would have been able to. . . . [H]e imitated the accent of South Korean President Moon Jae-In. . . .

He seemed to measure American politicians primarily by how they treated him. . . . Trump vented about governors who continually expressed during private meetings how impressed they were with [him] . . . As he has done many times before, Trump proudly mentioned his uncle who was a professor at MIT. . . .

[H]e eventually turned to the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. According to his memory, the expert opinion was off. The "real story," Trump argued, "has yet to be written." When Congress met to certify the Electoral College results, Trump told us, there had been a "peaceful rally," more than a "million people" who were full of "tremendous love" and believed the election was "rigged" and "robbed" and "stolen." He made a "very modest" and "very peaceful" speech, a "presidential speech." The throng at the Capitol was a "massive" and "tremendous" group of people. The day was marred by a small group of left-wing antifa and Black Lives Matter activists who "infiltrated" them and who were not stopped, because of poor decisions by the U.S. Capitol Police when some "bad things happened."

During our hour together [a video of the conversation is included at the link], Trump didn't have many questions for us. Even in his attempt to correct the record, Trump mostly didn't acknowledge or engage with informed outside criticisms of his presidency. He did, however, admit to having sometimes retweeted people he shouldn't have, and at one point he said, "when I didn't win the election"—phrasing at odds with his false claim that the 2020 vote was stolen. . . .

He seemed to want the approval of historians, without any understanding of how historians gather evidence or render judgments. . . . In practice, professional historians gather their evidence by reviewing essential written and oral documents stored in archives—which is why so many in my profession shuddered upon learning that boxes of material were initially carted off to the former president's home at Mar-a-Lago rather than given directly to experts at the National Archives. . . .

A few days after our meeting, Trump announced that he would stop doing interviews with authors, because they had been a "total waste of time." He added: "These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality."

Julian E. Zelizer is a history and public-affairs professor at Princeton University. He is the editor of the forthcoming book The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.