With two New Year’s resolutions Donald Trump could secure a more favorable legacy

Donald Trump is one of the most divisive figures in the United States since the Civil War. He bears considerable responsibility for America’s disastrous response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, legitimizing white supremacy and lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. 

Nonetheless, with two widely publicized New Year’s resolutions, Trump could serve his country well while going a long way toward securing a more favorable legacy. Here’s how.

1) Until very recently, Trump’s endorsement of vaccines was tepid. He declined three times to be photographed while getting a jab. Former Vice President Mike Pence, by contrast, received his first shot at a live TV event. Trump was conspicuous by his absence when former Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and their wives participated in a public service announcement urging Americans to get vaccinated. On Aug. 21, 2021, at a rally in Cullman, Ala., Trump said, “Take the vaccine. I did. It’s good.” But when the crowd booed, he retreated, “No, that’s OK. That’s all right. You got your freedoms. But I happened to take the vaccine.”

In late December 2021, Trump, who knows how to blow his own horn, changed his tune. He boasted, as he had before, that the development of vaccines in record time was an “historic” achievement of his administration and urged his supporters to “take credit — we saved tens of millions of lives.” But this time, he shrugged off boos that followed his revelation that he had taken a booster shot: “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, no, no. That’s — there’s a very tiny group over there.” Trump pushed back as well at conservative media personality Candace Owens: “Look, the results of the vaccine are very good, and if you do get it, it’s a very minor form. People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.” When President Biden credited “the prior administration and our scientific community” for making the United States one of the first countries to get the vaccine, Trump expressed surprise and appreciation: “I think he did something very good. You know it has to be a process of healing in this country, and that will help a lot.” 

Trump’s first New Year’s resolution should be to double down on his efforts — in media appearances and rallies — to reduce vaccine hesitancy, which remains high among his ardent Republican supporters. He can — and certainly will — continue to claim that mandates are not the answer. But as the omicron variant surges, Trump can look backward and forward, taking credit for the speed in which safe and effective vaccines have become available while advancing, in more ways than one, the “process of healing in this country.”

2) For Trump, the road back to the White House is strewn with uncertainties and obstacles. The former president will be 78 years old in 2024 and is overweight, and, according to Franklin Graham, “the guy does not eat well.” Trump will face potentially damaging revelations emanating from a blizzard of litigation: a criminal indictment of the Trump Organization for tax fraud by the district attorney of Manhattan; a related civil inquiry by New York state Attorney General Letitia James into possible inflation of property values to secure bank loans; a criminal investigation by the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., of violation of the state’s election laws; suits by police officers injured in the assault on the U.S. Capitol; a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on the release of documents by the National Archives related to the assault on the U.S. Capitol; and, of course, the ongoing investigation by the select committee in the U.S. House of Representatives into whether he obstructed justice and incited an attempted coup.

Support for a Trump reelection campaign has declined: 59 percent of Americans do not want him to run, with an additional 14 percent “not sure.” Twenty-three percent of Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 do not think he should be on the ballot in 2024, and the vast majority of independents agree. When the former president is matched against other potential GOP presidential aspirants, only 44 percent of Republican voters choose him (down from 58 percent in August), a result that might embolden one or more of his rivals to throw their hats in the ring.

A former casino magnate who hates losing and losers and who doesn’t care all that much about governing, Trump may well decide not to roll the dice. A New Year’s resolution, framed as a desire to place the welfare of his fellow Americans ahead of personal and partisan interests, combined with a challenge to Biden to help unify the country by bowing out as well, would almost certainly raise him in the esteem of millions of Americans across the ideological spectrum and — who knows — spread the narrative, despite charges that it’s a rebranding campaign, that The Donald is an elder statesman who helped preserve democracy.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”