Thanks to 81 million American patriots, the Trump presidency ended today as Joe Biden took the reins.
The nation can finally exhale: we outlasted the childish sociopath and would-be dictator.
It seems so long ago when the curse known as Donald J. Trump was inflicted upon the United States by voters who wanted to try something “different”, as in a guy with no governmental experience, a businessman with multiple bankruptcies to his name, a TV reality show host, a misogynistic lout with several marriage failures, a racist, a xenophobe, and a self-absorbed narcissist.
“What could go wrong?” Or, as candidate Trump put it to African American voters in 2016, “What do you have to lose?”
As is turned out, pretty much everything could go wrong and, in the process, threaten our Constitutional democracy.
The basic problem that President Trump had from the get-go was the fact that most Americans didn’t like him in 2016 and didn’t vote for him. He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes but gained the Presidency through the Constitutional flaw known as the Electoral College. Yes, he was President, but he had no popular mandate to govern.
His only chance to effectively lead the Nation was to add Democratic and Independent skeptics to his political base…which, for some reason, he chose not to do. Instead, he spent four years pandering to his extremely conservative political base and further dividing the country.
For all his faults, Donald Trump is a master of social media, which he has effectively utilized to mobilize his followers, demonize his enemies, obscure truth with lies, and advance cockamamie conspiracy theories. Like it or not, Trump has dominated television and radio “news” programming for the past five years. He is a true believer in the Oscar Wilde quote, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
I cannot think of a day in the past five years when candidate Trump or President Trump wasn’t being talked about on “front page news”.
Like many Americans, I found myself curiously interested in Trump world, checking various news sources daily to see what outrageous things he’d said, what oddball Federal policy he was pushing, which ethic group he’d insulted, how many allies he had alienated, what Presidential norm he was now violating, the names and shady credentials of his Administration appointees, and which of those individuals he had fired for being disloyal or, worse, competent.
It was also interesting to see the multitude of vermin that crawled out from under the rocks where they’ve been hiding across America, with their mean-spirited and hateful agendas now validated by the President of the United States.
White Supremacist skinheads flying Nazi flags were welcomed into society as “patriots”.
The “Trump Show” was so ludicrously entertaining that my wife Charlie, who cares nothing about politics or government or news, for that matter, started insisting that we began the morning watching the CBS News…to see what new shit Trump was up to.
It wasn’t long into the Trump presidency (maybe a few hours!) when American learned that their new leader was a world-class liar and, perhaps, the greatest the world has ever known. The pathology was right there for all to see: he seemed to lie even when the truth would have served him better. He was a true salesman…”always closing” some imaginary deal, at least in his mind. Even his Administration spokespeople were perplexed because they didn’t have the slightest idea what would come out of his mouth next or why. Hence, policy was flexible: it depended upon President Trump’s mood that day or hour.
The only thing that one could be sure of was that he was lying every time his lips moved, Tweeted, or posted to social media.
The new President took Nixon’s idea of an “enemies list” to new heights. Trump’s enemies included: the press; any Democrat; Mexicans, Muslims and Chinese; allies; the United Nations; any Administration appointee who didn’t go along with his lies or bad ideas; experts on any subject; career Federal employees; the F.B.I.; the World Health Organization; and Inspectors General in any governmental agency. If you found yourself on this list, you could expect name-calling through Trump’s social media, threats and intimidation, and retaliation.
Our new President was a bully, and he enjoyed bullying employees, Republicans, businesspeople, and foreign nations.
The Administration went through a bunch of Press Secretaries who tried like Hell to read his mind, lie like the dickens to cover up the Bosses obvious falsehoods, and re-engineer his public statements or Tweets to make him look more intelligent or less meanspirited than he actually was. At some point, live press conferences with the President became too hostile, and then live press conferences with Press Secretaries devolved into shouting matches, and then press conferences were eliminated. One Press Secretary held that position for nine months without holding one press conference.
The last person to hold that position, Kayleigh McEnany, promised on her first day that she “would never tell a lie” to reporters. That obvious falsehood was the first of many.
So many things that President Trump did were just wrong.
Our Commander-in-Chief complimented dictators, thugs, and kleptocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Syrian President Bashar al- Assad, and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He gave Russian President Putin a pass on meddling with the 2016 election, paying Muslims to kill American soldiers, and an audacious cyber hack of American national security agencies.
At the same time, our President bad-mouthed America’s long-time allies and their leaders. Go figure.
President Trump engineered a tax cut, ostensibly for working class American, but the lion’s share of the benefits accrued to the Nation’s super rich. The latter group already controlled 90 percent of the country’s wealth: this made them richer.
The Trump Administration started a tariff war with economic foes and trading partner allies alike. This raised the cost of products here in America with no discernable balance of trade impacts upon the targets of the tariffs. The attacked nations responded with tariffs of their own. China, the prime target of the tariff war, experienced a 2.3 percent gain in GDP in 2020, while the U.S. economy shrank by 4.3 percent.
Several public instances of police brutality and systemic racism against African Americans outraged the Nation and sparked mass demonstrations in major cities. The President’s tone-deaf response: use police brutality to quell the protests. Accordingly, his redneck and “law and order” political base was elated, but Trump’s response to this crisis was an insult to African Americans who would, in the 2020 election, get their payback.
It is hard to understand Donald Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic.
One would expect the Wharton School of Business graduate to understand that the underlying strength of the United States economy is its citizenry, and the condition of their safety, health and welfare should be the primary concern of the President. Sick or dead people can’t work, young children can’t babysit themselves, and consumers are going to spend less in a time of uncertainty.
The first priority of the President, when alerted to the potential of Covid-19, should have been to tell Americans the truth, ask them to join together to defeat the virus, give local public health officials whatever they needed for testing, and emphasize the urgency of the matter by setting an example.
He did none of those things. In fact, he smirked at these measures, and urged his followers to do the same…which they did.
From the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020, the President minimized the threat, scoffed at public health measures recommended by his own Coronavirus Task Force, advocated quack cures, and publicly dressed-down, demoted, or fired Administration officials who told the truth. He consistently told America that the problem would “go away soon” and that his Operation Warp Speed would develop and distribute Covid-19 vaccine “before Christmas”.
He was wrong, as usual.
We are now one year into the pandemic and 400,000 Americans have succumbed to this plague, 3,000 citizens are dying each day, untold millions have been sickened by it, and every worker, business owner, parent and child has felt its wrath. It has totally overloaded our Nation’s hospital system. The teeny, tiny virus that President Trump dismissed as “nothing more than the flu” has devastated the U.S. economy.
President Trump hasn’t publicly mentioned the pandemic in several months, hasn’t expressed empathy to those who’ve been affected, and hasn’t moved a muscle to help States deal with the carnage.
Speaking of health matters, candidate Donald Trump promised in 2016 that he would scrap President Obama’s signature health care insurance legislation (known as the Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare”), which benefitted the working poor, and replace it with a new and improved version. The President and his Republican allies in Congress had four years to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Even as late as 2019 they were promising, in the coming weeks, a “beautiful” health care plan.
What did they come up with? (Drum roll)…absolutely nothing.
Candidate Trump promised to “Drain the Swamp” of lobbyists and politically-connected advisors in Washington D.C. He also promised to bring “the very finest people” into his Administration. What did he actually do? He filled his Cabinet and high Administration positions throughout every Federal agency with industry lobbyists, partisan political hacks, and relatives.
Those “fine” people, apparently the best he could recruit, didn’t last long: only a few made it through the four years, many quit in disgust, and most of them (90 percent) were fired by the President.
Their crime: not backing him up when he lied.
Truth was a scarce commodity during the Trump years because anything that didn’t square with things the President said were considered untrue, false, fake or damned lies by Mr. Trump and his faithful political base. Our modern-day Wizard of Oz even convinced three-quarters of his followers (according to a recent poll) that he actually won the 2020 election…which he lost by 7 million votes.
The President’s colossal Big Lie was the underlying cause of the deadly and destructive January 6th Capitol Riot, for which Mr. Trump is now being impeached by Congress for inciting.
Today is Inauguration Day for Joe Biden. I have some neighbors who believe that Donald Trump is still the rightful President, that he won the election, and that Joe Biden is a usurper. Of course, they also believe that Jesus walked on water, so they are predisposed to believe in things with no factual basis.
The problem is that we have a country chock full of people like that. They’re not a majority, thank goodness, but there are enough of them to cause a lot of anger and turmoil. They are devotees of gossip and “fake news” put out by conservative media that takes advantage of their appetite for salacious stories. The goal: to exaggerate differences between “us” (the good guys) and “them” (Satan’s spawn).
Donald J. Trump, now ex-President with the shameful legacy of being the only American leader to have been impeached twice, has yet to concede defeat by Joe Biden. He’s the first President in 150 years to not attend the Inauguration, he and wife Melania didn’t welcome President and Mrs. Biden to the White House, and he purposely fouled up the transition between Administrations so that President Biden would have as rocky a start as possible.
What a classless guy! But, then, we already knew that.
My wife Charlie and I (and two neighbors) watched the Inauguration today on televison. It’s the first one I can ever remember watching live. To be honest, all of us expected something horrible to happen because of the events of January 6th. Luckily, nothing did.
As President, Joe Biden will be the complete opposite of Donald Trump, a fact that was made clear in his Inaugural Address this morning.
The entire theme of the Inauguration was “unity”, from the Invocation, to the Presidential Address, to the entertainers, to the words of the Youth Poet Laureate, to the Benediction. Empathy for others was also a common theme, as was the goal of actually listening to the other person. Diversity was celebrated on a day when Kamala Harris, a citizen of Indian and Jamaican ancestry, was inaugurated as the first female Vice President in the Nation’s history.
None of these themes ever graced a speech by candidate or President Donald Trump. For five years, Trump inundated America with imagined horrors, demonization, pandering to hate groups, bragging about things “he” accomplished, and blaming others for his actual failures. “Unity” was not in his vocabulary nor in his public demeanor, despite being President of the United States of America.
Joe Biden’s entire life has been about public service, as a councilman, a six-time Senator, and a Vice President for two terms. He is known for working “across the aisle” in Congress to achieve bipartisan legislative successes. He is a decent human being who is respected by all who know him.
Very few Presidents have had to deal with so many problems on the day they took office. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, for sure. It’s a very short list. Joe Biden stepped up to the plate and accepted the challenge.
If anyone can help mend the fractured political, social and economic landscape that is America in 2021, it is Mr. Biden. He has a big heart and will endeavor to be a good President to all citizens including, as he noted today, “Those who didn’t vote for me.”
This pledge is something that Donald Trump never made nor attempted to fulfill. His goal was to obtain power and use it to reward his political base and self-deal, if the opportunity presented itself. As to the folks who didn’t support him in the 2016 election: they could go to Hell as far as he was concerned.
That was the key to Trump’s downfall: he tried to be a one-man team, with one-man’s ideas, while disdaining help from other players. As any coach will tell you, there is no “I” in team. By not reaching across the political aisle, by not developing policies that would benefit all Americans, even those who didn’t vote for him, Donald Trump doomed his Presidency.
Speaking of Hell, ex-President Trump can expect a world of torment now that he is just a private citizen. Scads of lawsuits await him as do several banks who’ve lent him hundreds of millions of dollars. And he is still subject to his impeachment trial in the Senate. He’s going to be a busy guy in retirement.
And, in the end, he will go to Hell.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
