Well before 2020, when he tragically failed to lead the nation through the pandemic — and long before Jan. 6, when he launched his unprecedented, anti-constitutional assault on Congress and democracy itself — President Donald J. Trump had already cemented his place as the most inept and dangerous leader in America’s history. On Wednesday, his reign of chaos finally came to an end.
From the June day in 2015 when Trump descended a golden escalator to launch his presidential campaign on a platform of xenophobic lies, he dragged America into descent with him. It was barely a year into Trump’s term when, in a 2018 survey for the American Political Science Association, 170 scholars ranked him dead last among U.S. presidents. Psychiatrists and mental health experts warned of dangerous narcissistic tendencies. And the worst was yet to come.
With this walking constitutional crisis of a man finally, mercifully having exited the stage, it’s worth reviewing all the ways he has hurt America, well beyond his pandemic incompetence and his election lies. In areas like the economy, the environment, global relations, the rule of law and the very self-identity of our culture, Trump’s disastrous tenure shined a bright light on flaws we didn’t know we had.
