I watched a chilling clip from the Daily Show recently. It wasn’t particularly new. It was from an episode that aired earlier this summer, but it frightened me, and made me think about the different versions of the narrative that might come to be. The interview was with Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. The important part of the interview described a meeting with Trump in which Trump brought out a document, purportedly from a historian, that ranked him as the most powerful person who has ever lived. This was reported in the New York Times in an article about a book that described the meeting, and in the book itself. It turns out that the document wasn’t created by somebody that most people would consider a qualified historian, but was instead created by a friend of a friend, who is more what most of us would call a history buff. Nevertheless, the description of Trump as being more powerful than the people on this list explains a lot about how he sees himself, but raises plenty of questions.

The questions arise because none of the people on the list are people who most Americans would consider the good guys in history. Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. He seemed to draw a contrast with those figures, in that they ruled by fear, and he doesn’t see himself that way, but he still seemed to revel in the place he held. A place of more power than any of those people. More power than Alexander the Great because of his global impact. More power than others because of the size of the US military (the size of his military, as he describes it). Objectively, it might be accurate, but it’s frightening to me.

It has me, once again, thinking of the arc of history. There is, for instance, an alternate reality in which Hitler is the good guy. The guy who (in this narrative, not in my view, so please don’t misunderstand me) rid the world of what was wrong with it and united Europe to make it the greatest unified nation the world has ever seen. Had he won the war, taken over all of Europe, entered into the same Cold War that the US had with the Soviets, and won. If Europe rose to be the world’s leading economic power and used their position to help smaller nations repel aggression from others, the history books would paint a very different picture of Hitler, and also a very different picture of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman.

On the one hand, it would be great if thirty years from now, the country will be in a place that makes it hard to find anybody who will admit to having been a Trump supporter. On the other hand, for the country to turn so hard against Trump and all that MAGA has become, Trump will have to be considerably larger in his impact, and suffer a clear defeat. He will have to wage war on the world, or something like that, and lose spectacularly. I don’t want that, and I also think there’s more of a chance that any large move like that by Trump would end in victory, and possibly a history in which it’s hard to find anybody who would admit to not liking Trump (unless they say that they didn’t like him at first, until he won the…whatever it is that he wins in this scenario that I don’t want to happen).

There are so many times that I want a time machine. To be able to go back and change something to see the impact, and in this case, to be able to see where it’s all going. I’m certainly worried.