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Unlike other recent U.S. presidencies, the Trump administration does not seem to be regularly inviting renowned historians to advise White House officials on policy or chronicle its decisions for posterity. (Think Jon Meacham under President Joe Biden, or Taylor Branch during the Clinton administration.) That absence is generally consistent with the Trump administration’s avowed posture of anti-intellectualism. But it also stands in tension with what has become increasingly obvious several months into President Donald Trump’s second term: that this U.S. government is consciously setting out to make history.

This is evident in part in Trump’s personal pursuit of glory—universal adulation for superlative achievements—of which his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize is the most obvious expression. He wants figures or institutions of authority to recognize that he has made America great again, and thus himself qualifies as great.

Unlike other recent U.S. presidencies, the Trump administration does not seem to be regularly inviting renowned historians to advise White House officials on policy or chronicle its decisions for posterity. (Think Jon Meacham under President Joe Biden, or Taylor Branch during the Clinton administration.) That absence is generally consistent with the Trump administration’s avowed posture of anti-intellectualism. But it also stands in tension with what has become increasingly obvious several months into President Donald Trump’s second term: that this U.S. government is consciously setting out to make history.

This is evident in part in Trump’s personal pursuit of glory—universal adulation for superlative achievements—of which his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize is the most obvious expression. He wants figures or institutions of authority to recognize that he has made America great again, and thus himself qualifies as great.

But the administration’s interest in history making is expressed not via appeals to existing institutions but rather in bids to remake the landscape of institutions and thus enter a new era of history entirely. This is the sort of history making captured in the ambitious world ordering of former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation—and the destructive iconoclastic impulses unleashed during........

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