The End of a Time of Darkness

 

The End of a Time of Darkness

January 20, 2021

 

Whew! We made it! Donald J. Trump is no longer President of the United States. We are coming to the end of one of the darkest presidencies in American history. There actually is one good thing we can say about Trump’s presidency, namely that he never started a new war. He came close with North Korea and Iran, but those tensions never became wars. That he did not start a new war is no small thing, and we should be thankful for it. Still, Donald Trump will certainly go down in history as one of the worst American presidents ever. The list of his failings and his outrages is too long for me to list in anything close to completeness. I will however try here to list some of his worst offenses. I list them in no particular order of importance except that I save what I think is the worst of them until last.

 

·         He was utterly incapable of telling the truth. The number of his lies runs to more than 20,000 according to people who tried to keep track of them during his time in office. He simply did not operate within the categories of true and false. He led us into a post-fact era. His rabid followers care nothing for what the actual facts of a thing are. They make up their own facts to fit with their conspiracy theories and other inanities, and Trump reinforced their abandonment of the truth by repeating not only his own lies but many of theirs.

·         He was perhaps the laziest president we have ever had. He wouldn’t read the daily intelligence reports the president always receives. Apparently he never reads much of anything. He spent more time watching Fox News and playing golf than he did attending to the duties of his office.

·         He effectively dismantled much of the machinery of the American government. He put people in charge of Cabinet departments and other governmental agencies who wanted nothing so much as to dismantle the organizations for which they had nominal responsibility. He often did this by putting political hacks in as “acting” heads of an agency, leaving them there, and thus avoiding the constitutional necessity of having them confirmed by the Senate. A prime example of a destructor not a contributor is Betsy DeVos, the recently resigned Secretary of Education, a woman who would dismantle public education entirely if she could. At the end of his term he put several political hacks with no qualifications for the positions into offices of responsibility at the Pentagon for reasons that remain unclear. A person’s qualifications for an office never mattered to Trump.

·         He has done everything he could to repeal as many environmental regulations as possible. He pulled us out of the Paris climate accords. He approved any number of environmentally destructive pipeline, drilling, and other construction projects. He was always perfectly willing to deny climate science (or at least claim to do so) so that wealthy people could make more money at the expense of the environment. It remains to be seen how long it will take the country and the world to recover from the environmental devastation he has wrought.

·         When he didn’t like it he called accurate news reporting “fake news.” He called responsible media “enemies of the people.” “Enemy of the people” was Stalin’s term for the people he murdered in enormous numbers. It is a phrase used by a brutal totalitarian responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Soviet people. It is unclear whether Trump knew the term’s history when he used it, but it makes the blood of those of us who do know its history run cold. Trump’s attacks on freedom of the press were one of his most destructive practices.

·         He called white supremacists “fine people.” He sent them dog whistles all the time that told them that he was on their side. One good example is the time when a group of white terrorists calling themselves The Proud Boys were inciting violence against racial justice protestors. He didn’t call them off. He told them to “stand down and stand by.” He told them, in effect, to be ready, for he could call on their violence at a later date.

·         He hated Islam and Muslim people. He instituted immigration policies designed to keep as many of them our of the country as possible, apparently thinking them all terrorists or at least willing to pander to that belief among so many ignorant Americans.

·         He instigated a policy of child separation at the southern border that was pure fascism. He had American immigration personnel tear children away from their parents if they had crossed the Mexican border illegally. He kept them in what amounted to cages. His bureaucrats kept such bad records that it may never be possible to reunite all of those children with their families. For this policy alone he should be put on trial in the international court in The Hague for crimes against humanity.

·         He cozied up to dictators all over the world. His love affair with Vladimir Putin of Russia is well known but utterly incomprehensible. He took Putin’s word over the reports of the US intelligence agencies that Russia had not interfered on his behalf in the 2016 presidential election, which Russia clearly did. He practically made love to Kim Jong-un of North Korea, a murderous dictator and leader of what is probably the most repressive government on earth. Clearly he wanted to be that kind of dictator himself.

·         He obstructed justice. The Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election details act after act for which Trump could have been indicted for obstruction of justice had the Department of Justice not had an incomprehensible opinion letter from the 1970s saying that the DOJ could not indict a sitting president. I suppose it is unlikely, but it sure would be sweet if he got indicted for obstruction of justice now that he is out of office.

·         He tried to get the government of Ukraine to dummy up an investigation of Joe Biden’s son that he thought would discredit Biden, the apparent Democratic presidential candidate at the time against whom he would run in 2020. This was the first thing he did that got him impeached. The Senate should have convicted him and removed him from office, but of course it didn’t because the Republicans held the majority of seats and for the most part were still Trump’s acolytes rather than responsible legislators. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was the only Republican senator to cast a vote to convict Trump on one of the articles of impeachment.

·         He mismanaged the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic about as badly as it is possible for anyone to have mismanaged it. He knew very early on he knew how disastrous the pandemic would be, but he consistently downplayed and minimized it. He called it a hoax. He said it would just disappear. He told people to drink household cleaners or take some unapproved anti-malarial drug to treat it. Apparently he thought it would affect only states led by Democrats. He never ordered anyone to wear a mask, and mostly he never wore one himself. He held mass rallies that became superspreader events. When private industry worked miracles to produce vaccines against the virus in record time he claimed credit for their accomplishment that he in no way deserved. He muzzled the CDC and forced them to change the advice they gave the public about how to mitigate the pandemic. He demanded that states “reopen” when it was obvious that doing so would inevitably result in a greater spread of the virus. We can’t really say how many of the over 400,000 deaths from COVID-19 we’ve suffered so far he could have prevented had he acted responsibly rather than the way he did, but the number surely must run to the tens of thousands at least.

·         The worst of it came at the end of Trump’s term of office. He lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. He lost both the popular vote (which sadly doesn’t count) and the electoral college vote (which sadly does count). Yes, something over 70 million people voted for Trump, hard as that is to comprehend. Still, he lost the popular vote by a significant amount. More people voted for Joe Biden than had ever voted for any presidential candidate. The election officials of every state and the District of Columbia certified the results of their votes. Trump’s team of incompetent lawyers, often led by the utter despicable Rudy Giuliani, filed frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit challenging the election results in states that voted for Biden that Trump thought he should have won. They all failed spectacularly at every level from the trial court to the US Supreme Court. Still, Trump refused to concede the election. Worse than that, he made up the big lie that he had actually won the election in a landslide and that somehow Democrats had stolen his victory from him. It wasn’t true. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to support it, but Trump fed it to a mob of his rabid supporters over and over again. Finally, on January 6, 2021, as both houses of Congress met to certify the vote of the electoral college, Trump incited a mob of fascist, mostly white supremacist, rioters to attack the Capitol building, the seat of the legislative branch of the US government and, as everyone says, a shrine to American democracy. Trump’s whipped up supporters broke into the Capitol building, killed one Capitol police officer, occupied every important space in the building from the Senate chamber to the office of Speaker Pelosi. They chanted “Hang Pence,” because Vice President Pence had told Trump he had no legal authority to overturn the outcome of the election. Trump refused to call them off. Eventually he did tell them to go home, but in that same statement he repeated the big lie that the election had been stolen from him. This was the act that led the House to impeach him a second time, making him the only president in US history to have been impeached twice, a distinction he so richly deserves.

·         Trump was, in short, an American fascist. He does not believe in democracy. He used race-baiting politics. He practiced the big lie. He wanted to be a dictator not a democratic leader of a democratic country. No, he didn’t set up an American Auschwitz. He didn’t invade anyone. He was nonetheless a fascist for the American context. May we never have anyone like him ever again.

 

The list of Trump’s transgressions could go on and on, but I think the point is made. The only question about Trump is whether he was the worst president in US history or only one of the worst. I think perhaps Andrew Jackson was worse, for Jackson happily engaged in genocide against American Indians, something Trump didn’t do (perhaps only because the genocidal actions of Jackson and so many other Americans had already rendered the American Indians politically powerless a long time before Trump came along). Rutherford B. Hayes sold out the newly freed Americans in the south by promising in 1877 to remove federal troops from the states of the former Confederacy in exchange for the Democrats allowing him to become president in a disputed electoral college vote. He thereby surrendered those Americans to the racism, discrimination, and violence of what became the Jim Crow south. Woodrow Wilson, otherwise and idealist in so many respects, was a staunch racist who resegregated the federal civil service. Lyndon Johnson destroyed what could have been a constructive presidency (he signed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) through his barbaric militarism in Vietnam. Richard Nixon broke the law in so many ways they’re hard to keep track of. He resigned the presidency because leading Republican senators (including the arch conservative Barry Goldwater) told him they would vote to convict him if the House sent articles of impeachment against him to the Senate, which they were about to do. Ronald Reagan made greed respectable and ballooned the federal deficit in order to give giant tax cuts to rich Americans who definitely did not need them and which did ordinary Americans no good at all. George W. Bush started an unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq. We’ve had lots of really bad presidents who did really bad things.

Then we come to Donald Trump. It would be hard for anyone to match his list of political transgressions. Beyond that, he was probably the most psychologically insecure, egomaniacal, and sociopathic person ever to hold the presidency. He cares not at all for anyone other than himself. I won’t call him the worst American president ever only because he did not start any new war. He is nonetheless very near the top of the list of disastrous American presidents. His attack on American democracy at the end of his presidency was particularly dangers and will probably be what leads later historians to condemn him more than will any of his other disastrous actions and personal failings.

And we’re done with him, for now at least. Former senator and vice president Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States. In his first hours in office Biden will do as much as he can by executive order to begin undoing the damage Trump did in so many areas of American life. He and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman ever elected to national office in this country and the first woman of color to be vice president, promise to restore both honesty and dignity to the White House and to our American nation. They have an ambitious legislative agenda, all of it good as nearly as I can tell. They will restore integrity to the agencies of the federal government. Biden will nominate cabinet secretaries and others for positions in the government from which they can turn governmental policy around from Trump’s evil toward the good. President Biden will repair the breaches with our allies that Donald Trump caused and do what he can to restore America’s standing in the world. I expect that President Biden will do as much good for us as the US Senate, split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, will let him do.

Yet whatever he is able to do or not able to do one overriding truth remains. Joe Biden is not Donald Trump. Trump was a despicable failure of a human being. Joe Biden is a decent man, a kind man, a man of honesty and integrity. He has lived through more than one occasion of great personal tragedy and come out of them caring for all who suffer. As a child and youth he had a bad stutter, so he has true empathy for people with disabilities. He says he’ll be straight with us, and I think he will as much as any president can be given the necessity of maintaining many things in confidence. Perhaps even Americans who disagree with some of his policies will come to respect him enough as a man that they can disagree with him without going to the mattresses the way so many Republicans have in recent decades. That at least is my hope and prayer as my country moves into a new era, a new time. We have come to the end of a time of darkness. May light now shine once again in our land.