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 46th 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.
