A historian who’s publishing a record of Donald Trump’s presidency believes he will make another run for the White House.
Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer, the editor of the forthcoming book The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he was was contacted by the former president, who had read about his work and wanted to correct the record with his own version of reality.
“It’s hard to look into the mind of a former president, of former President Trump,” Zelizer said. “What I do know and what everyone in the Zoom room could see was the way he interpreted and spun his history was at odds with what most people understood to be true. This ranged from his account of Jan. 6 which was totally at odds with what we all saw on television, to his telling us that he was very tough on Russia and even listening to those remarks again in the context of where we are today is just a president who is willing to say what he wants to say and doesn’t feel there are guardrails controlling his narrative of events.”
Zelizer got the sense from speaking with Trump last July that he intended to make another run for the presidency.
“It didn’t sound like someone who was finished with politics, and here in that conversation was someone very much eager to end the story on his own terms, meaning that’s what he was doing with us,” Zelizer said. “He wasn’t letting us write the book and come away with what we found, but rather almost wanted to explain to us how to understand him. For me, that’s a politician who is not done.”
“Look, I came away from that — literally, I turned [off] the computer and said, ‘He’s going to run again,'” Zelizer added. “I don’t know if that’s true, that is just my assessment of what I heard, and he was a disruptive president. he brought all of the most disruptive elements of our politics, from the way the media works to some of the political elements we have discussed, and brought them to the surface. We are reckoning not just with the former president but with the state of our democracy, and that’s what we really need to understand.”