Historian David McCullough says Trump's rise baffles him
Looking through the lens of his long view of American history, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough told host Marvin Kalb Thursday that Donald Trump’s rise to be the presumptive Republican nominee baffles him.
“How does the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower even consider nominating a man who has risen to his prominence and wealth by television shows and owning gambling casinos?” he replied to Kalb’s question asking how the American political experiment could produce Trump.
Trump, McCullough said, has never served his country in any way – ever -- and doesn’t seem to have any curiosity about what he might need to know to do the job.
“It would be as if we were about to put someone in the pilot seat who has never flown an airplane, and we’re all going to get on board," he said.
McCullough’s comments on Trump were part of a conversation about American history and the nature of writing it with the man who is one of the greatest practitioners of the generation. He is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award a president can bestow on a civilian, for his accomplishments.
Is it true that America is in decline, the hallmark message of some presidential candidates, Kalb asked.
“No,” McCullough said. “I have traveled all over of this country this past year, been in 26 states. In every city I have been in something of admirable accomplishment is happening. People are very pleased in how things are improving in their time.”
He said bad news was always more appealing to readers and television viewers than good news, and the idea that there was some perfect time in the past when everything was great was misguided.
“There never was a simpler time,” he said. “We have always been facing calamity; the sense we are on the brink of some calamity about to happen.”
In the next five months, he said, the news media “need to bear down to make these candidates tell us what they’re really about and what they know and what they don’t know and how they are going to make up for what they don’t know.”
McCullough said his cause in life was to find figures who deserve credit and have not received it. He said he believes in the importance of failure, to write about people who made mistakes but got back up on their feet and pushed on.
“When choosing a leader, it’s important to take a careful look at how often he has faced failure or an embarrassing mistake,” he said. “If they have never known failure, I would say be careful. Because every president of the United States will have things go wrong.”
The Kalb Report is a joint project of the National Press Club’s Journalism Institute, the University of Maryland University College, the George Washington University and Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It is underwritten by a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.