"evaluating Lincoln and Trump" Topic

Me:
Lincoln was maybe the most hated president during his lifetime, until perhaps now Donald Trump. Evaluating Trump now is fruitless because we do not know what the world will look like in two years? Does the Iranian regime fall? Is Cuba libre? what does gasoline cost? Lincoln WAS evaluated in November 1864 and a few months earlier had been justifiably concerned he would fail reelection. Fortunately Atlanta and Mobile fell early enough to sway the election. But things take time and especially wars and long term economic developments. So public perception matters, and is ALL that matters every four years, but in the meantime a president can do almost what he pleases as long as he has 34% of the senate to vote down an impeachment. So not only do historians revise presidential ratings over time, but there is also the perception of the public and of Congress etc. while he is in office, but also the willingness to ignore negative perceptions and carry on with the vast powers regardless. Trump is the latest but far from the only president abut whom nobody is neutral. And we need to wait five or ten years to know how to rate him, which rather casts doubt on our democratic system!

ChatGPT:

I think that exposes a fundamental difficulty with presidential evaluation and democratic accountability that is more interesting than the usual argument over whether historians are biased.

There are really three different clocks running.

The electoral clock asks every two or four years, What do voters think now?
The governing clock asks, Is the president accomplishing what he is trying to accomplish now?
The historical clock asks, sometimes decades later, What did those actions actually produce?

Those clocks can give radically different answers.

Lincoln is almost the perfect demonstration. On August 23, 1864, he wrote the extraordinary memorandum beginning, "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected." The Library of Congress notes that the military stalemate and political disaffection had convinced Lincoln that defeat was likely.

Then the military situation changed dramatically. Farragut's victory at Mobile Bay came in August and Sherman's capture of Atlanta in early September. By November, voters were evaluating a visibly different strategic situation from the one they had seen in July.

And that raises a disturbing counterfactual. Suppose Atlanta had fallen on November 15 rather than September 2. Nothing about Lincoln's underlying strategy need have been different. Nothing about Sherman's generalship need have been different. But voters might have been asked to pass judgment before receiving a crucial piece of evidence about whether the strategy was working.

That isn't necessarily a defect peculiar to democracy. It is an information problem inherent in governing through time.

Hamilton anticipated part of your argument

What you say about a president being able to disregard transient public opinion is remarkably close to Hamilton's defense of the four-year term in Federalist 71.

Hamilton wanted enough duration to give the executive "personal firmness" in using his constitutional powers and to provide stability to an administration. The point was precisely that a president should not be continuously responsive to every fluctuation in public opinion.

That produces an apparent paradox:

Democratic accountability requires presidents to respond to public opinion. Good government sometimes requires presidents to ignore it.

Lincoln is an unusually strong example. If he genuinely believed preserving the Union required continuing the war, then changing strategy merely because the electorate was temporarily exhausted might have constituted worse presidential leadership—even though the electorate possessed the constitutional right to replace him for doing so.

I would modify one part of your impeachment formulation

Your 34-percent shorthand captures the political point, but constitutionally there are a couple of qualifications. The House first has to impeach by majority vote, and conviction then requires two-thirds of senators present, not two-thirds of the entire Senate. Thus, assuming all 100 senators participate, 34 votes against conviction are sufficient to prevent removal.

But I'd be careful with "almost whatever he pleases." A president remains constrained by statutes, appropriations, courts, Congress, elections, bureaucratic capacity, federalism and political support. What is true is that unpopularity itself does not terminate a presidency. There is no parliamentary vote of no confidence.

That was deliberate. The Constitutional Convention actually considered something closer to legislative removal. The Senate's history of the Convention records the concern that this would make the executive a "creature of the Legislature."

Andrew Johnson provides the spectacular historical demonstration: most senators voting on his impeachment wanted him removed—35 to 19—but that was one vote short of the required two-thirds. He remained president.

And this complicates our McDonald framework beautifully

We now have another distinction to make.

There is presidential performance, and there is contemporary evaluation of presidential performance.

Those aren't the same thing.

Imagine a president undertaking a policy whose costs are immediate but whose benefits, if they materialize at all, won't be apparent for ten years. At least four different judgments become historically relevant:

Question

Who can answer it?

Is the president explaining the policy convincingly?

Contemporary public

Is the president politically succeeding in implementing it?

Contemporary observers

Is the policy actually working?

Often uncertain contemporaneously

Was it ultimately beneficial?

Sometimes knowable only much later

The third and fourth are particularly troublesome. Sometimes even the president doesn't know.

That applies especially to war and foreign policy. Truman left office deeply unpopular while the Korean settlement and his broader containment policies could only be evaluated with considerable hindsight. Conversely, a policy can look successful initially and reveal serious costs years later. Historical judgment therefore isn't merely contemporary judgment with partisan emotion removed; historians possess evidence the voters literally could not have possessed.

Which brings us to Trump

The methodological point you make about the current presidency is sound without assuming what any of today's unresolved questions will ultimately produce. In September 2026, some consequential policies and international developments simply have not run their course. We can establish what decisions were made, what their stated objectives were, what their immediate consequences have been, and how different constituencies perceive them. We cannot yet observe their long-run outcomes.

So there are perfectly legitimate historical questions about a sitting president. But "How successful was the presidency?" is necessarily provisional while the presidency itself is unfinished.

And five years afterward may still be too soon for some questions.

But I don't think this necessarily casts doubt on democracy

It tells us something slightly different about what elections accomplish.

An election isn't a historical verdict.

Voters aren't sitting as a seminar of historians determining whether the previous four years constituted a successful presidency. They are exercising a constitutional power: Given what we know now, who should exercise executive power for the next term?

They necessarily vote with incomplete information.

That makes your Lincoln example especially powerful. The electorate of 1864 wasn't being asked:

"Will historians in 2026 consider Abraham Lincoln a great president?"

It was being asked, in practical terms:

"Who gets control of the Union war effort on March 4, 1865?"

Those are entirely different questions.

And there is one final irony that brings us right back to McDonald. Public perception can simultaneously be an unreliable measure of presidential performance and an important component of presidential performance.

If Reagan persuades Americans that the country is recovering its confidence, that perception itself may have political consequences. If Carter fails to persuade them, that failure itself matters politically—even if some of his policies eventually prove successful. If Lincoln cannot sustain Northern willingness to continue the war, his military strategy may never get enough time to work.

So perhaps our eventual framework needs three separate columns rather than one ranking:

Performance — Perception — Consequences.

And critically, they need dates attached. Perception in 1864 is a historical fact deserving explanation; consequences as understood in 1870 are another; our assessment with 160 years of evidence is another.

That would make for a much more interesting presidential history than a list running from "great" to "failure."

I am currently in the final stages of my project on THE FEDERALIST, which the AI is aware of. So its answer very helpfully integrated my work from ANOTHER project -- done last year -- with the current question. That is worth a LOT.

Is there any way I can block any thread that is cross posted to Artificial Intelligence?