President Donald Trump has been fixated on how he’ll be remembered in history as advisers try to shift his attention to other matters, like the economy, and Republicans express concerns that he’s hurting their chances in the midterms, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Trump has entered into “legacy mode,” a senior official in his administration told the newspaper.
And aides, per the WSJ, revealed he’s considering how “future generations” will view him, adding he’s “conscious of avoiding the fate of past occupants of the White House he views as weak, such as Jimmy Carter.”
Carter — who lost his bid for a second term when haunted by the Iran hostage crisis and inflation — was among the “failures” on a ranking of the “greatest” presidents that Trump shared to his Truth Social platform on Thursday.
At the top of the “greatest”-of-all-time list? Trump himself.
Trump has made somewhat of a habit of naming things after himself, slapping his name on currency and otherwise fixating on so-called “beautification” projects — like the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and his planned White House ballroom — as his approval ratings wade underwater.
“He is one of the handful of presidents who thinks on an entirely historic scale,” ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) told the WSJ.
“He wants to be consequential. He wants this to matter. He wants to be the kind of president who people say, you know, it mattered that he was president.”
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Trump’s “legacy mode” has left Republicans privately worrying if his all-about-me campaign is “backfiring with voters,” the WSJ reported.
In recent months, the president has publicly gushed about inflation and declared that he doesn’t think about Americans’ “financial situations” as a factor in talks to end his unpopular war of choice in Iran.
Critics called the latter remarks a golden opportunity for Democratic attack ad-makers as the party hopes to take back control of Congress in November.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle, in a statement to the WSJ, said Trump is “solely focused” on delivering prosperity and peace to the country.
“The only legacy President Trump is concerned with is making America greater than ever before,” he said, adding, “When all is said and done, this president will undoubtedly go down as the most successful and consequential president in modern American history.”