Way to completely ignore the pandemic and the complete and utter trashfire of health policy and implementation that came out of the White House. Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary dead. And that’s a conservative estimate.
Or any of the emergency response stuff. The paper towel rolls in Puerto Rico? Sweeping the forests? Remember that? Sure, those were the visuals but backed by total ineptitude by the folks running FEMA, most of whom actually subsequently were replaced at the top.
Trump was not a competent president. He certainly failed to do a great job during any crisis he faced. During the pandemic, he mostly went with what Fauci wanted to do but in a half-assed, semi-undermining way. And he’s crazy and stupid, so he said some stupid, stupid shit. But it’s not as though he crafted his own policy or negated the CDC’s.
This isn’t exactly hidden knowledge. The executive, through how they execute, influence or even determine effective policy. And that was on full display during not only the pandemic but during essentially every emergency situation we faced during his term.
And not only there but in matters of most foreign policy, where our relations with much of the world has not yet recovered, and countries are watching warily to see what happens this year.
And that strategy seems to be working. Namely, repeat enough lies and encourage enough selective memory and bizarre equivalences, and people - even people who aren’t supporters - start buying into it.
Not having a firm ideology is quite different from the idea that “in terms of policy, Trump wasn’t that bad”.
He actually was that bad at policy, interjecting himself into it often at the most inopportune times. Perhaps it can be argued that the lack of any coherent overall policy vision tempered the worst of any potential excesses, but the results clearly speak for themselves.
It draws a false equivalence with other Presidents (Biden and George W Bush) that actually are ludicrous and helps to normalize his behavior, which we’re still seeing to this day. He continues to get a pass (apparently even from a self-admitted non-supporter) on policy decisions and behaviors that would be career ending from anybody else.
Trying to kill the ACA without a plan for replacing it seems like terrible policy to me. And he’s taking aim at a strict national abortion ban with “punishment for women” in his second term.
I think there’s no end to the number of shitty and retributive policies he wants to implement. With maybe the worst being using the power of office to remain in office after his term expires.
I can’t recall if I’ve recalled this story before, but there really are a lot of Trump supporters who want to burn it all down. They think the country doesn’t care about them, or their concerns. They think everyone else has sold them out to offshoring, to immigrants, to elites who think they know better, on and on. They don’t understand why it was possible to drop out of school in 1955, get a job at a factory, and buy a house but it isn’t anymore. They believe that 95% of Democrats and Republicans are the exact same in this respect, and they love that Trump puts his thumb in their eyes and fights for them. Never mind that from an actual governance perspective he does no such thing.
I have a relative. He’s a lawyer. He’s very, very unhappy with his life. Crappy marriage, a law career that never delivered the riches he expected, and a whole host of complaints that are a combination of bad decisions and bad luck. But he doesn’t recognize that he has any personal responsibility for how all this has turned out. He believes in a conspiracy of elites to keep him down.
I asked him once what he’d like Trump to do, and he said “I’d like to see the whole thing torn down and rebuilt.” He calls me an unpatriotic sellout because I have pointed out to him that the status quo has actually been good to me.
If you spend time in MAGA spaces you see this a lot.
Let me put it another way. Take away all the bad behavior and imagine Trump being soberly presidential but doing the same things.
He would get dinged for sure on the Muslim ban and the Wall, but he would mostly be remembered as a normal Republican (to us, not a good thing at all, but not that bad for a Republican).
Whereas, between the Patriot Act and his Wars, Dubya is rightly remembered as an extremely incompetent and destructive president. In terms of behavior, however, is remembered as at least trying to seem presidential. Dubya did have an ideology (neocon) and it was a bad one.
“Take away everything Trump did wrong and he’d be considered a better president” is an odd take.
His management of the pandemic (including the dismantling of the pandemic response resources Obama had left him) was criminally bad and resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
His economic policies damaged the agricultural and manufacturing sectors immensely.
He gave classified information to hostile powers, ceded America’s soft and hard power globally, and undermined our relationships with all of our allies including working toward a withdrawal from NATO.
He ran up the deficit while funnelling hundreds of millions in taxpayer money into his own pockets and billions into the pockets of his cronies.
And of course there was all the crime and attempting to overturn the election through skulduggery and violence.
Even by GWB standards, Trump was a horrible president.
I have to wonder what he thinks that will look like, and why he thinks Donald “Bankrupted a Casino” Trump would be anywhere near competent enough to do it.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the notion of tearing it all down and re-building it, but I also have no illusions about how complicated that will be. There’s a reason why people like George Washington are still revered; they understood how difficult the job was, and were at least reasonably competent at rebuilding society.
And even in that case, they needed at least two tries at it.
He, and others like him I know, have a romantic idea that it would be better. Probably it wouldn’t, and most likely we end up with something awful. I think they believe the masses would rebuild in some idealized Leave it to Beaver world.
I should say this relative isn’t a racist, as far as I know. So to be fair to at least some of them, when they see 1955 as some pinnacle of American Greatness, the lack of inclusion isn’t a feature. It just isn’t important to them. It’s the idea that you can be a bus driver, or a laborer, and still have your cape with a white picket fence. Nobody tells you what to do. Nobody tried to make you drive an electric car.
I’m not defending, but I do think it’s worthwhile to understand.
And I do acknowledge that some of the grievances are legit. I think it was easier for unskilled labor to have a decent life back then.
And that’s one of the saddest things about it. Other than the satisfaction of seeing the “establishment” types rage impotently, Trump &Co. have been doing nothing to deliver the longed-for Again-Greatness. All the policies have been just the usual “more money and power to the already rich and powerful” crap. Because they (Trump, Miller, Bannon, the Freedom Caucus, etc.) are doing just fine in this system so their motivation is to extract even more wealth and power from it.
One reason you could get a well paid factory job right out of high school: we were the only intact super power after WW2. So we had much less foreign competition, so corporations could afford to pay better wages. Those conditions no longer exist
I’m well aware. In fact, in the post war period the US’ share of global GDP was north of 40%
But I’m pretty confident that it’s true that lower-skilled labor today has it much worse than in times past, and while it’s nice to imagine we can make everyone a doctor, programmer, master carpenter, etc. for a variety of reasons there’s a host of people who will never achieve that. Even a respectable working class life is out of reach for many of them.
Politics is often a BS contest. Promise more than you can actually deliver. Hold together coalitions that are really at cross purposes.
So whether every Trump supporter really wants to burn it down, or they just like hearing the words, is unknown. We are all allowed to take Trump at his erratic word of course. But some others have done more to put words into bad actions. That’s worse. It does matter.
They will probably take over a ‘Big Box’ store or two. Once they are all inside and surrounded, it will likely turn into a scene from the Mist. Only most of them will be armed.