Trump's Future on the Menu

In the entrance to the US Senate Members’ Dining Room, there’s an old menu from March 24, 1941. On the back, presumably to record a bet, seven senators wrote the dates when they thought their country would enter World War II. Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democrat from Mississippi, thought “never.” So did D. Worth Clark, one of the two senators from Idaho. Millard Tydings of Maryland guessed either July 14, 1941 “or 1961.” A fourth senator thought Sept. 17, 1945.

Only three of the seven predicted that the United States would be at war before the end of the year, but not one of them got the month right. (They guessed July 24, Aug. 24, or Sept. 24, whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was on Dec. 7 and the German declaration of war on the United States on Dec. 11.)

Now imagine a similar exercise in March 2019. At what date will Donald J. Trump leave the office of president? If, as in 1941, the majority of your seven senators were Democrats, I would guess that at least three would predict Jan. 20, 2021 — the day the Constitution requires Trump to hand over the White House if he is defeated in the November 2020 election. But I doubt they would all say that.

Senate Democrats are under instructions not to talk about impeaching Trump, but I am sure more than a handful of them think about it. So perhaps two out of seven would go for an earlier date, perhaps some time next year. But that would leave two pessimists. The first might say Jan. 20, 2025 — acknowledging that the president they love to hate could win a second term. The most pessimistic of them all, having read all those overwrought articles from two years ago about the coming Trump tyranny, might write “never.”

One great benefit of recording such political wagers is that, years later, they can remind historians that the familiar past they study was once the uncertain future. We all know that the United States eventually joined the fight against the Axis powers. But that did not seem inevitable to many contemporaries, even in March 1941. In the same way, no one should pretend to know for sure how long the Trump presidency will last.