The trump era, the trump legacy

Here are my thoughts on the Trump presidency..
In a few hours the Trump Presidency will come to an end. I’m not going to go through everything that went wrong with this administration, but it should’ve been obvious that it wasn’t going to end well. Trump likes to tell a story about a snake and a lady that takes him in. The lady cares for the snake and shows it love but the snake still bites her. The end of the story is the snake tells the lady “You always knew I was a snake but you still took me in.” Anyone who has paid any attention to Trump’s career could have seen this coming. Trump was still the same man who peddled a fraudulent university and went bankrupt multiple times. He was always a snake and the people like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and much of the country knew it yet still took him in.

Trump is leaving office with the country weaker both on the international stage and domestically than the one he took over. He will go down in history as the worst US President combining the graft of Harding, the disrespect of Constitutional principles of Andrew Johnson, and the callous indifference to a crisis as Hoover and Buchanan. For a President who built his popularity off of entertainment and talked about having a “Chaos Presidency” it’s fitting that the indelible image from the last days of it will be a man in face paint and bison horns ranting from the dais of the US Senate.

The most tragic part of this was that it didn’t have to be this way. Trump had the potential to change the Presidency in ways that no other President had. He had the potential to transcend the parties and with one of the most devoted followings to push Congress. As someone who for most of his life hadn’t been a member of either party and coming from the outside, he could’ve pushed policies that united instead of divided the country. There were brief glimpses of that potential when he got Criminal Justice Reform passed working with Democrats and when he got the first CARES Act by pushing reluctant Republicans to support it. Instead, Trump chose to increase the division and measured his successes by personal loyalty to himself and benefit to his family. His largest successes owe far more to Mitch McConnell controlling the Senate than to anything he himself did.

Trump likes to think of his Presidency as a drama with him as the hero. In Greek tragedy the hero always has a flaw. Trump’s flaws would have been well known to the Ancient Greeks and history has been filled leaders who had potential but failed because of their own weaknesses. In many Greek tragedies too, it is usually not just the hero that pays for his flaws. Thebes suffered for the flaws of Oedipus and as we wake up this morning to a very uneven economy, divided country and the worst COVID-19 death toll of any country Americans are suffering for the flaws of Trump.

Trump Presidency, like Trump Airlines, and Trump University will now be left to history. I do not think history will remember it any better than those other Trump projects.

 

Lying til the End. Talking about BS numbers. Same speech from his failed campaign.

 

And of course he still calls it the "China virus".. No sense of responsibility for anything..

 

The great Divider.

No president has ever worked harder to separate and divide America. Sadly, he was good at it and he was successful.

Trump will also be remembered as the President that fed his supporters blatant lies in order to stay in power after losing an election.

And finally, Trump will be remembered for inciting a mob of his supporters to invade the capital in order prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

 

YMCA!

 

This was his last stand.....competing till the bitter end.

 

I know words, the biggest words, the best words...

BYE!

 

Great post. I think people sleep on the absolutely enormous opportunity this president had with his unique populist platform, the critical bipartisan interest in infrastructure, and leading in a crisis (COVID). Infrastructure bill, a tad less race-baiting (just a tad), and listening to real doctors in 2020: landslide re-election and a very different legacy. He could have even kept up all the mean and crazy tweets.

People on the right also seem to avoid his own role in all the mountains of criticism that piled upon the guy. Negative media attention followed, (and often just quoted), a consistently negative, pugnacious and spiteful message from that president. Oh well. Good riddance, at least from that office.

 

I think General Mattis sums up Trump's presidency well with this one sentence:

"Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,”

 

The best thing about Trump presidency: It is over!

 

Would love to forget these last 4 years.