Bashar Al-Assad, today, is going into that "dustbin of history". His army deserted him, Damascus fell, he's in flight.
What qualifies a prominent person for dustbin-hood?
First, you have to be bad at your job, and associated with Bad Times, with little good to compensate. (Mao is not going into the dustbin, evil and murderous as he was; China rose to much more power in his time.) People want to forget Bad Times, and they'll forget you along with them.
But, second, you have to not build things. If you build any infrastructure or even social structures, those will carry your name forward, and even sanitize it - Andrew Carnegie saw that one. Saddam Hussein will be better-remembered than Assad, because he liked to put up buildings and walls. (His name on every single brick, making him hard to erase.)
I had to laugh, today, at the National Post. On this huge day for international news - a dictator falling - Conrad Black couldn't get his obsessions away from domestic enemies, writing a column about it being Joe Biden that's going into that dustbin.
Thinking back over recent leaders, what will they be known for? Will they be remembered at all, or bin-bound? Pierre Trudeau gets the nod for all that Constitution-building, I think. Subsequent Canadian PMs, not that much built, but no Bad Times either. (Justin may get a small nod for cannabis legalization, a then-brave political leapfrog over "decrim", after 70 years of Prohibition.)
The USA, a vastly-larger "stage", remembers builders; Eisenhower is now mentioned as often about the Interstate Highway System as for WW2. Obama gets on history's pedestal for free by dint of his race, but while getting mentioned, they'll probably note he fought a long pitched battle to finally get some sort of public health care rolling. He built it up enough that they can't (don't dare) kill it, and it'll go on. Like FDR's New Deal, it's just a bureaucratic structure, but a permanent one.
What did GW build, besides an anti-terror spy bureaucracy, and a war that was unlawful and unsuccessful? A lot was built in his time, but the memories will all be of a financial crash that his party was about 80% responsible for, even if they dragged their opponents along - as with the war. The 2024 election convinces me that Obama would never have had a prayer of election, if the GOP were not so associated with both failed wars, and the most-failed economy since 1929.
The president who will surely be remembered as a builder, however, has got to be Joe Biden. Like Obama, he had to rebuild a broken economy first, then build major new programs on top of that. The two goals were not in opposition, however, as he rebuilt with Keynesian stimulus, almost entirely with tax expenditures that encouraged three and four private investment dollars for every dollar of tax foregone. The building programs were "Uncle BIL" (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) and "Uncle IRA" (the climate infrastructure programs). Both were huge infrastructure bills, after decades of America neglecting its basic infrastructure, and letting its manufacturing base go offshore. The Biden Bills put both into restoration.
Biden will undoubtedly fare particularly well in "history" because what he built will endure to set a basis for a whole new economy. Starting the transition of all the power generation, space and water heating, industrial bases, and (again!) the auto industry, will probably come up more-often than the Interstates.
The shortest and deepest trip to a dustbin is surely the Dustbin of GOP history. Nobody was bigger in the GOP a dozen years back than Richard Cheney, the only veep in history to have his own movie biopic, showing him directing his own President on foreign policy. Nobody in the GOP is now more out-of-power and never-mentioned. Deep in the dustbin with him, of course, are all the people who served Trump and then slagged him in books: multiple cabinet secretaries, chiefs of staff, powerful men: now so deep in the bin, they don't even try to speak.
Trump undoubtedly wants to be remembered as a glorious figure. That's quite possible, massive warts and all - he just has to start building things that really lasts, and I doubt he has any ideas.