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.
THE ECONOMY
Even in this historically mendacious administration, there have been few bigger lies than Trump’s claim that he “turned around” the economy in his first three years in office. Key indicators from Barack Obama’s economic recovery (gross domestic product, employment, the stock market) continued growing at virtually the same rates in Trump’s pre-pandemic tenure. The most notable divergence was in middle-class incomes — which grew by 6% during Obama’s last two years, but slowed to less than 3% in Trump’s first two years.
Trump and his party unnecessarily added nearly $2 trillion to the deficit with tax cuts for the rich, making it more difficult to weather the pandemic. Trump’s unprovoked trade war with China hurt American consumers and required billions in bailouts to farmers.
On health care — in some ways the ultimate economic issue — Trump found he couldn’t eliminate the Affordable Care Act, so he undermined it at every turn, never offering the alternative he had long promised. It’s still possible the Supreme Court could invalidate the entire ACA at the Trump administration’s urging, spiraling tens of millions of Americans into medical debt because insurance companies would no longer be required to cover their preexisting conditions.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Trump’s hostility toward the land, water, air and very climate of America and the world can be traced directly to two of his most disturbing personal attributes: his rejection of science and his belief that whatever industry wants, industry should get. In four short years, he facilitated the loss of millions of acres of federally protected land, pursued a counterproductive and ultimately doomed campaign to save the coal industry and set back development of renewable energy.
Less than five months into his term, Trump announced he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, abandoning what is literally a fight for planetary survival. After putting professional polluters in top environmental posts, Trump’s administration decimated air, land and water pollution standards, relaxed protection of endangered species and opened Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging. Trump’s attempt to roll back automobile emissions standards was so environmentally reckless that even top carmakers rejected it.
To say the Biden administration will be a breath of fresh air is a statement of literal reality.
GLOBAL RELATIONS
For more than 70 years, American presidents of both parties have relentlessly defended the international structure of Western democracy that served as a wall against tyranny at the end of World War II. Trump is the first American leader who has failed to honor that sacred responsibility.
Trump’s undermining of NATO with petty squabbling, his abuse of long-held U.S. alliances, his disturbing affinity for dictators across the globe and, most of all, his baffling and chilling subservience to Russia’s Vladimir Putin has hurt America in ways that will reverberate for years to come.
Has there ever been a more disturbing foreign-policy moment than Trump standing next to Putin in Helsinki in 2018 and, before the world, endorsing the Russian autocrat’s denial of election meddling over the insistence of U.S. intelligence? Has any president ever come closer to out-and-out treason than Trump did last year, when he continued treating Putin with maddening deference even after reports that the Kremlin had put bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers?
It’s clear why Putin put so much effort into aiding Trump’s 2016 election. No wonder more than 130 former senior Republican national security officials last year signed a statement warning that Trump had “gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader.”
RULE OF LAW
The irony in Trump’s appropriation of Richard Nixon’s “law and order” mantra during 2020’s protests against police violence is that this president has been even more brazenly lawless than Nixon was.
The Russia investigation showed that Trump repeatedly committed obstruction of justice in trying to prevent the probe into his campaign’s disturbing dalliances with the Kremlin. Trump barely bothered to disguise what he was doing when his Justice Department intervened in criminal cases to protect cronies Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. Trump’s subsequent pardons of Flynn and Stone — along with war criminals, crooked cops, Trump’s felonious campaign chairman and the father of Trump’s son-in-law — have been so self-serving and corrupt that there is serious talk for the first time in more than 200 years of scaling back presidential pardon powers.
Trump has flouted congressional subpoenas and removed multiple government watchdogs from their posts for doing their jobs. He has refused to separate himself from his business interests while openly pushing foreign and domestic officials to stay at Trump properties. Americans have never had to meaningfully focus on the issue of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses — until now. Trump’s brazen violation of the premise that presidents shouldn’t profit from the presidency has opened an entirely new debate that will outlive his administration.
Justification for both Trump’s impeachments — for trying to strong-arm Ukraine for his political benefit, and for inciting insurrection on Jan. 6 — were virtually undebatable. He is a criminal. The fact that a majority of the GOP has refused to acknowledge that clear fact will linger over their party long after the criminal himself is gone.
AMERICA’S SOUL
Not since the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s has there been such a shameful and cruel government policy as Trump’s dystopian separation of migrant families at the southern border. It was only the most obvious example of how deeply he has damaged America’s self-identity as a bastion of tolerance and compassion.
Under Trump, overt racism was fashionable again, misogyny was wink-worthy and entire swaths of America — especially the urban swaths where most of us live — were deemed un-American. From dubbing the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville, Virginia, “very fine people,” to telling congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came,” to tear-gassing peaceful protesters so he could pose for a photo op at a Washington church, this president has, time and again, shown himself to be not only historically unpresidential, but personally repugnant.
Presidents always to some extent reflect the soul of the nation during the time they lead it. In that sense, Wednesday’s transfer of power was an exorcism of sorts: the expulsion of the nation’s worst demons, in favor of a new leader who, policy debates aside, personifies the decency that resides at the heart of America — but hasn’t resided at the White House for the past four years.
Good riddance, Donald J. Trump.
