By Samford Bach
Sedona, AZ — There is a question about Donald Trump that cannot possibly be answered today, no matter how much his supporters love him or his opponents despise him: How will history remember him?
Will future generations regard Trump as the dangerous, divisive president his harshest critics portray, or will historians look beyond the tweets, insults, controversies, court battles and political warfare and conclude that, underneath all the noise, Donald Trump fundamentally changed America and the world?
It is not an absurd question.
In fact, there is a case to be made that when historians eventually examine Trump’s presidency from the safe distance of 25, 50 or 100 years, they may see accomplishments that are difficult to appreciate while Americans are still busy screaming at one another.
Start with the border.
Trump promised to secure it. Whatever one thinks about his methods, the numbers show an extraordinary decline in illegal border crossings.
Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border fell to their lowest level in more than half a century during fiscal 2025. More recent measurements have continued to show dramatically fewer apprehensions than during the final year of the Biden administration.
That doesn’t mean nobody is crossing illegally, as Trump sometimes claims. They are.
But there is an enormous difference between saying Trump exaggerates his accomplishments and pretending those accomplishments don’t exist.
His critics also have legitimate ammunition. Trump’s mass-deportation program has swept up large numbers of people without criminal convictions, including people with families, jobs and longstanding ties to American communities.
That raises serious questions about due process, proportionality and whether a policy originally sold to Americans largely as a campaign to remove dangerous criminals has expanded far beyond that mission.
But here’s the uncomfortable question for Trump’s critics: Would any of this have happened without him?
For decades, Republicans and Democrats talked about America’s broken immigration system. Presidents promised reform, Congress fought, politicians blamed each other and the border remained a political disaster.
Trump didn’t just talk about it. He changed it.
Whether history ultimately approves of the methods is another question.
Then there is artificial intelligence.
This may eventually prove to be one of the most consequential parts of Trump’s legacy, although most Americans aren’t talking about it over dinner tonight.
Trump has essentially planted an American flag in the middle of the AI revolution and said: We intend to win.
His administration’s AI Action Plan is built around accelerating innovation, constructing the enormous energy and computing infrastructure AI requires and making American technology dominant around the world.
That approach carries risks.
Some of the very people building the most advanced AI systems warn that this technology is moving extraordinarily fast and requires serious safeguards. A president who steps too heavily on the accelerator could someday be criticized for not spending enough time looking for the brake pedal.
But Trump understands something many politicians are only beginning to grasp.
Artificial intelligence isn’t another new gadget.
It may be the industrial revolution, the computer revolution and the birth of the internet rolled into one.
The nation that dominates AI could dominate enormous portions of the 21st-century economy, science, medicine, defense, manufacturing and communications. Trump has decided that nation should be the United States.
History may have quite a bit to say about that decision.
Then there is Iran.
Trump’s supporters see his willingness to use American military power against Iran as classic Trump: unpredictable, aggressive and willing to do what previous presidents threatened but hesitated to do.
His administration argues that military action was necessary to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities and eliminate a threat to the United States and its allies.
Critics see something very different. They question whether the war was necessary, whether its objectives were achievable and whether military action has created additional instability and economic pain.
Those arguments aren’t going away.
Neither is the larger question behind them: Does peace come through restraint or through convincing your adversaries that you really will pull the trigger?
Trump has placed his bet on strength.
And that brings us to leadership.
Donald Trump does not lead like the presidents Americans grew accustomed to watching during the television age.
He doesn’t sound like Ronald Reagan.
He doesn’t sound like Barack Obama.
He certainly doesn’t sound like Dwight Eisenhower.
Trump is Trump.
He insults opponents, attacks institutions, repeats himself, exaggerates, wanders off topic and sometimes says things that leave even his supporters wondering what the hell he was talking about.
His critics understandably consider those characteristics presidential defects.
His supporters see something else.
They see a president who doesn’t speak the carefully manufactured language of Washington. They see somebody willing to walk into political china shops with a baseball bat and start swinging.
And sometimes china shops really do need rearranging.
Trump’s critics have also made a strategic mistake throughout much of his political career: They have often concentrated so intensely on Trump’s personality that they have underestimated the importance of his policies to the people who elected him.
Call him a narcissist.
Call him crude.
Call him reckless.
Call him whatever you like.
None of those words changes the border statistics.
None changes the direction of American AI policy.
None answers the arguments over Iran, trade, energy or the proper role of American power.
And none explains away why tens of millions of Americans have continued supporting him through controversies that would have destroyed the political careers of almost anyone else.
That doesn’t mean Trump’s critics are wrong.
Presidential greatness isn’t measured merely by whether a president accomplished what he promised. History also asks what those accomplishments cost, who benefited, who suffered, whether constitutional institutions were strengthened or weakened and whether the consequences endured after the president left office.
Trump will have to face those questions just like every other president.
His economic record is similarly complicated.
There are encouraging numbers in investment, wages and economic growth. But there is also genuine economic anxiety, stubborn inflation, high energy costs and Americans who couldn’t care less what Washington’s statistics say because they’re standing in a supermarket wondering why the hell everything costs so much.
Both realities can exist simultaneously.
And perhaps that’s the problem with trying to understand Donald Trump while we’re still living through Donald Trump.
Everybody wants the verdict now.
The MAGA faithful already have theirs: Trump saved America.
His fiercest opponents have theirs: Trump damaged it.
History doesn’t work that quickly.
Harry Truman left office deeply unpopular and is now generally regarded much more favorably by historians. Other presidents once celebrated have seen their reputations deteriorate as later generations reconsidered their records.
Trump will get the same treatment.
Someday the rallies will be gone.
The red hats will be sitting in museums.
The protesters will have gone home.
The cable television panels will finally, mercifully, shut up.
And historians will be left with the numbers, documents, wars, treaties, executive orders, economic results, technological changes and consequences.
They will ask whether Donald Trump secured America’s border or went too far in doing it.
They will ask whether his use of American military power made the world safer or more dangerous.
They will ask whether his economic nationalism strengthened American workers or saddled them with unnecessary costs.
They will ask whether his willingness to unleash artificial intelligence helped ensure another century of American technological leadership or whether the country moved too quickly into something it didn’t completely understand.
And they will ask whether his disruption of Washington was exactly what America needed or whether the price of that disruption was too high.
Those questions won’t be answered by MAGA.
They won’t be answered by Trump’s enemies.
They won’t even be answered by Trump.
They will be answered by what happens next.
But those who have spent the past decade dismissing Donald Trump as nothing more than a loudmouth, a showman or a political aberration might want to consider one possibility.
History has a wicked sense of humor.
And it occasionally has a habit of surprising everybody.