Commentary

In my research, I frequently see references that former President Trump’s accomplishments will be judged by historians. HA!

The best-known modern day presidential historians – Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin – have already gone on record as anti-Trump, without giving his accomplishments a chance to percolate over time.

Most Americans listening to them being interviewed on television news programs are unaware of their bias and their cozy meeting to advise President Biden.

“The historians Biden has invited to the White House generally take a longer view, placing his presidency in the context of America’s path since its founding,” The Washington Post reported. “(He) has thought about what makes some presidencies more successful than others.”

Beschloss, who was hired by MSNBC as a contributor, suggested Biden “talk about the fact that we are in existential danger of having our democracy and democracies around the world destroyed” as he delivered the State of the Union Address.

Again, appearing on MSNBC, Beschloss compared Trump to convicted, and executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg while commenting on the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.  How ludicrous.

Following Biden’s speech with the blood red backdrop of Independence Hall, Beschloss compared it to Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedom’s“speech.  How absurd.

We since learned that Beschloss and other historians met with Biden and suggested that democracy was in danger like it was before the Civil War and World War II.

Beschloss claims not to have written his speech, and that he and the other historians didn’t give political advice. “We’re not equipped to do that.”

Without the slightest embarrassment that he had abandoned the mantel of being non-partisan, Beschloss, appearing on MSNBC’s “All In,” relating that “Biden was inspired in part by a closed-door meeting with a group of historians who warned him of the dangerous moment for the future of democracy.”

Then days before the midterms, appearing again on MSNBC, he told host Chris Hayes that “we could be six days away from losing our rule of law … we are on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system” where children could be “arrested and conceivably killed.”  What!?

“Do you really think it’s a week away, possibly?” the perplexed news lightweight Hayes asked.

Beschloss responded with references to Hitler and Mussolini.  “They had an election and how did that go?”

Mecham and Goodwin, undoubtedly included in that White House meeting, also appeared on Capitol Hill on the anniversary of the January 6 riot to warn that the U.S. was at a crucial turning point amid threats to its democratic system.

Is it a coincidence that Biden regular refers to his battle for the soul of the nation, since Meacham’s book is entitled, “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels?”

Prior to the 2020 election, Meacham used his position as a professor and historian at Vanderbilt University to offer his scholarly analysis on NBC.  However, Meacham declared that President Trump and his supporters were examples of being controlled by what is called “the lizard brain.”

In this outright insult to Trump and his supporters, he referred to the limbic system, which is all a lizard has for a brain function, he cited fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing-up and fornication as its features.

Since Biden’s election, Goodwin, too, has cast aside the non-partisan role expected of a historian.  In October of 2019, during an interview by Mika Brzenzinski on MSNBC, she seemed unwilling to be goaded into agreeing that Trump was leading us down the road to fascism, recoiling at using such loaded terminology to describe a U.S. leader.

Biden is expected to use the word of these historians in his 2024 election campaign if he decides to run.

With that in mind, the National Review noted that the historians have helped “to inflate Biden’s own expectations about his presidency, a necessary complement to the idea that all who oppose him stand in the way of history’s proper course.”

During my stint in the Air Force, I was given an opportunity to adapt my writing skills to that of a historian.  While it, like news writing, was fact-based, it required a different approach to the common four “W’s” and an “H.”  It called for deeper research and getting what is referred to as “getting into the weeds.”  There was certainly no room for commentary.

I understand that writing presidential history is quite different, but when I decide to read a biography of one of our presidents, I don’t want it influenced by a partisan hack.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.