‘Nobody really believes he’s president’: Historian Douglas Brinkley says Trump’s first year deserves ‘an asterisk’
Historian Douglas Brinkley talks on CNN (Screen cap).

CNN invited Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley on to assess the president's first year -- and his initial conclusion is that Trump's first year in office deserves "an asterisk."


"It's an asterisk president -- nobody really believed he is president," Brinkley said. "That's because of the FBI, the Justice Department constantly investigating him. You're waiting any day for a shoe to drop."

Brinkley did acknowledge that Trump had some successes -- most notably, the strong economy and the decimation of ISIS in the Middle East -- but he said those have all been overshadowed by the president's constant eruptions of divisive and racist rhetoric.

"Number one, for me, that history's going to look terribly on in the first year of Trump is racism," he said. "The bigotry of Charlottesville. The bigotry of comments he made about Haiti and Africa... this whole game of the national anthem and how he tried to game it and inflame the country."

Brinkley also said that the first line in Trump's obituary might turn out to be, "The president who couldn't stop using Twitter."

Watch the video below.