What Will History Books Say About 2018?

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At the end of last year, POLITICO Magazine asked historians if 2017 had been the craziest year in American politics. That was before 2018, when several of President Donald Trump’s onetime cronies were indicted for financial crimes, when rapper Kanye West delivered a soliloquy in the Oval Office and when an accidental alert had Hawaii residents convinced nuclear missiles were inbound for a full 38 minutes. That was before one midterm election and three government shutdowns, before the Trump administration ordered migrant children be separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and before the president’s historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. It was before the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and before 13 federal agencies issued a dire report on climate change that the White House attempted to bury. 

How will history remember this wild year? Which events were significant and which were distractions? POLITICO Magazine asked the smartest historians we know to put all that happened over the past 12 months in its proper historical context—by literally writing the paragraph that history books of the future will include about 2018. Here’s what they had to say:

The year of distraction
Joseph J. Ellis is the author ofAmerican Dialogue: The Founders and Us.

It is difficult to believe, but exactly a century ago, in 2018, the American media was obsessed with the fractured and frivolous presidency of Donald Trump.

Unmentioned, what they might have called “unbreaking news,” were the following movements in the historical templates fated to shape our own world: the ascendance of the Asian Empire, then called China; the crisis of confidence in all three branches of the federal government, which led to the calling of the Second Constitutional Convention and our current American Confederation; the accelerating erosion of the Greenland glacier, which eventually forced the evacuation of our coastal cities.

For all these reasons, 2018 has come to be called “The Year of Distraction.”...