Donald Trump was probably in our stars and in our national destiny. If we had to have a malignant narcissist for our president, we actually could have done a lot worse. He turned out to be as dumb as dirt, with a great ability to play to a crowd but a complete inability to get anything done.
Granted, he spent four years causing a lot of evil and testing our institutions in a way they have never been tested before. We learned our national ship of state contains some pretty shoddy bulkheads, such as our Justice Department. But under his assault it probably held up better it would have under a more adept dictator wannabee. Still, our ship of state has taken on a lot of water during Trump’s four years, more so than when Barack Obama had to take over after George W. Bush’s presidency.
By almost any standard, the Trump presidency was a disaster. Doing a post mortem of Bush’s two terms, I could only point to one accomplishment of his of any positive note: he did a lot to get anti-viral AIDS drugs where it was needed most: Africa, saving likely millions of lives. Trump’s presidency though doesn’t have any positive accomplishments.
Trump will probably claim his Operation Warp Speed was a success, given the quick development of a number of effective vaccines. But the truth is the government didn’t do much to help besides promising to buy up a lot of the vaccine, making it less risky to develop. It was mainly scientists working around Donald Trump that got it done, many of them outside the United States.
In the meantime, Trump made covid-19 infinitely worse by disdaining masks and sensible strategies to contain the pandemic. Now 400,000 Americans are dead of it and we have the dubious distinction of having the most deaths and highest infection rates of any country on the planet.
Just today Mike Pence tweeted that the Trump Administration was the only modern administration not to get us into a war. That’s debatable, but it depends on what you consider a war. Still, its non-management of the pandemic likely killed 300,000 of us that likely would be alive had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. We lost more citizens to covid-19 than we lost soldiers in all of World War II.
The Trump Administration just got worse as it went on. For the first year or so Trump’s worst impulses were restrained by staff, until he fired all of them. It was a government run by tweet, but really it was a government largely in name only. The ship of state was basically in a tempest the last three years. Every time someone left or was fired, their replacement was worse, resulting in some stunningly bad choices, like Bill Barr as Trump’s last Attorney General. Laws and often the courts were generally ignored within the administration. Grifting was in, the Hatch Act was out.
The 2020 presidential election went pretty much the way I predicted. The ensuing chaos reached a crescendo on January 6th with the storming of the Capitol. That was certainly the low mark of the administration and encapsulated everything wrong with Trump and his administration.
Amidst the daily horror though there was often dark humor to be found. In takes a bottom-of-the-barrel administration to give us a press conference at Four Seasons Lawn and Landscape instead of a Four Seasons Hotel. And who will forget a sweating Rudy Giuliani with his hair dye dripping down his sideburns at the RNC press conference?
Most Americans are now ecstatic and relived to put the horrible Trump era behind us. Only, what’s left of America looks little like what preceded this administration. It proved that the United States was a shoddy façade of a democracy that in the end sort of held together mostly due to institutional inertia and amazing incompetence by Trump and his cronies.
My wife spent the last four years mostly depressed and in a shock that won’t go away. I can name her condition: sustained emotional abuse, not inflicted by me, but by Donald Trump and his ilk. Obama got handed a terrible hand in 2009. Biden inherits a much worse country. We’ve been raped, and our abusers were Donald Trump and all but a handful of Republicans.
I do hope the door hits them in the ass as the exit.
Occam's Razor 