Donald Trump's scorecard
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| Trump pretends to drive a car across the stage while intoxicated, delighting Pence. // Photo by History in HD |
Even by political standards, what a weird four years it has been. And it seemingly got weirder and weirder every year, with a final year with a twist that would have blown anybody's socks off had it been a Netflix Original Series.
Here is what I will miss the most about the Trump Presidency: Over the last four years, when I debated Democrats or Democratic Socialists about how a free market system is better than a system organized by some kind of central planning bureaucracy, they would inevitably argue that if you don't like the system, you could always vote them out. In the past four years, I didn't even have to go through the logical steps of why that's a far worse system than one where anyone can vote with their wallet and feet. All I had to do was ask "Yeah, how's that workin' out for 'ya?"
Now he was voted out, and now the other half of the country is pissed off. Great system, where we guarantee that at least half the country is pissed off all the time.
The for-real first thing that I will miss the most is surprising to me, and at the same time, one of the things I hated the most about him. One of the reasons I was vehemently against Trump in 2016 was that I was absolutely certain he would start at least one major war. And he almost did when he murdered Soleimani a year ago. But his resistance to starting a new war was pleasantly surprising. Despite record amounts of bombing in 2018-2019, he did broker a peace deal in February of 2020 with the Taliban for troop withdrawal to finally end this insane 20-year war. Unfortunately, the full withdrawal isn't until the middle of 2021, so this hinges on whether or not Biden will fulfill the treaty. His foreign policy overall is an indication of just how bad things have been than him actually being good at something. Trump not starting a war makes him the best one at it in my lifetime. Reagan had Grenada and funded the Contra rebel group in Nicaragua. Bush 1 had Iraq 1. Clinton had Serbia, Bosnia, and had bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan. Bush 2 had Iraq 2 as well as Afghanistan. Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, had Syria, Libya, and Yemen along with raids in Somalia and Pakistan, rounded out by a re-bombing of Iraq post-withdrawal (does that count as new?). Trump "only" expanded existing wars. Honestly, the bar he had to clear couldn't be much lower. Also, see the #1 worst thing, below.
Trump also did some good work in deregulating various aspects of government. It was not nearly as much as I would have liked, but there were some bright spots. He demanded that regulators eliminate 2 regulations for every 1 implemented, which, while nicely symbolic, I'm not sure exactly how successful it was, since there could be one really bad regulation implemented for 2 immaterial ones. His FCC chair Ajit Pai repealed Net Neutrality, to which Reddit collectively claimed the internet will imminently break even though the law was only two years old at implementation (you're still able to read this post? your internet is still okay?). Betsy DeVos was able to reform Title IX to end the years of ruining innocent peoples' lives over the lack of due process for students and even professors. There was some good progress made in energy, most recently, in loosening dishwasher water limits that actually increased overall water and energy usage. Will the deregulation survive a Biden presidency? Some are already toast. Biden has vowed to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and will almost certainly reinstitute Net Neutrality.
The best justice in the US Supreme Court, by any libertarian measure, is Neil Gorsuch, by a football field. When he was nominated, I thought maybe Trump has some more gray matter up in his skull than I thought, but that vanished when he picked Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett. Not that the latter two are horrible as far as their jurisprudence, but they're not nearly as originalist as Gorsuch.
Trump, in his final moments in office, like his predecessor in his waning days as well, went on a pardoning spree. Pardoning his cronies notwithstanding, he pardoned many nonviolent "criminals". Removing people from cages who had not been violent toward anyone is always a good thing. Even still, I'm rather pissed that he did not pardon either Ross Ulbricht, Edward Snowden, or Julian Assange.
Lastly, I thoroughly enjoyed how he drove the corporate media insane. I'm not talking about the verbal fights Trump picked with the media. I'm talking about how the corporate media just hated Trump with every fiber of his body so much that they completely exposed themselves with brazenly idiotic takes, red-pilling a sizable portion of the country. I don't think Trump can really take much credit for this other than just him being him. But damn it, it's been fun.
The list of the bad is a lot longer and much worse than the good.
There are plenty of eyerollingly idiotic lists of bad things Trump has done such as this one. Really? These morons put "Calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahantas" at number 12, but didn't even mention any single war or the Yemen genocide? Is calling someone a name, even repeatedly, really worse than mass murder? The irrationality of people's morality and priorities is just bizarre when it comes to politics.
There are plenty of bad things about Trump, making it easy to make a list without becoming a parody of itself.
The worst thing about Donald Trump was also the best thing. Trump should have been impeached, removed from office, tried for war crimes, and have gone to prison for a long time for continuing and ramping up these disastrous existing wars, including vetoing a bill that would have ended the funding of our involvement in the genocide in Yemen, the biggest humanitarian disaster in the world. Over 3 million innocent people have been displaced by this conflict, facing massive famine. Trump could have, with the stroke of a pen after Congress did all the heavy lifting, stopped adding fuel to the fire, but he couldn't even find the brains to do that. That alone made him one of the evilest people on the planet in the last four years.
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| My son, two years old, is already $84,066 in debt. Getting a head start on that college debt. Great job, government. // screenshot of US Debt Clock |
His immigration policy from the outset has been terrible with his famous push for a wall as well as a travel ban from countries including Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea, and Venezuela. Many called it a Muslim ban, though one thing is more common throughout those countries: the United States has either waged a war, otherwise bombed, funded rebel groups attempting to overthrow their governments, or threw stiff economic sanctions against them. A far more humane response would be to accept refugees from these countries following a background check. It's the least we can do after playing major roles in indiscriminately destroying their homes (more so in some of those countries than others). The wall somehow got an outsized amount of attention. The amount of actual wall built was insignificant, just like its end effect will be to his originally desired ends. Just a waste of money.
Even more disastrous was his border patrol policy that led to hundreds of children separated from their parents at the borders as well as an expansion of ICE detention centers his predecessor built that lock up children, plagued by poor conditions. Still, despite Trump's best efforts, his deportation count was lower than Obama's, but that's kind of like trying to give a dumpster fire credit for being a slightly smaller fire than the dumpster fire one parking lot over.
His trade wars across the globe have likewise been a disaster for the domestic economy. Steel and aluminum tariffs have raised prices on domestic manufacturing firms that rely on foreign producers of these materials. Not only did China retaliate with their own trade restrictions, but Trump angered allies of the United States as well. The trade wars waged by Trump seem to be fueled by a lack of understanding of the full implications of tariffs as well as a misunderstanding of trade deficits and surpluses really mean. Then Trump imposed a 25% tariff on single malt Scotch, which is just unforgivable.
Though Trump had made some good appointments, he made plenty of bad ones. Placing John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, both of whom have never seen a brown country they didn't want to drop a bomb on, at the highest levels of security were by itself, an atrocity. Jeff Sessions, Trump's Attorney General, has been absolutely terrible in the ongoing fight to overturn America's disastrous drug policies, jeopardizing several states' legalization of marijuana.
What we had, as a president, in the last four years, was quite the enigma. On one hand, it was someone outside of politics promising to come in to "drain the swamp". Sounds great. On the other hand, the person chosen to do this was a narcissistic television host with little to no understanding of economics or civil rights or...much of anything, really, except how to rile people up. Even his seeming instinctual resistance to war appears to be borne out of a business decision of whether or not it was "worth it" to bomb another country than it was about any kind of compassion for people.
As bad as Trump was, I don't think his predecessor was any better and I have little hope that his successor will do any better. It's the same feeling every four to eight years. Overjoyed the president is on his way out. Depressed the next president is on his way in. Even more depressed that freedom will continue to erode to the point where the only possible outcome is violence. This is the curse of being a libertarian.
Grade: F
Sorry, I don't believe in grading on a curve.
