Trump on his own terms
David Hopkins has an interesting take on the failure of Trump’s presidency:
Regardless of these challenges, the general verdict on Trump among historians and political scientists, reporters and commentators, and most of the Washington political community (including, at least privately, many Republicans) is guaranteed to range from disappointment and mockery to outright declarations that he was the worst president in American history. And there is little reason to expect that the information yet to emerge about the internal operations of the Trump administration will improve his reputation in the future. Instead, it’s far more likely that there are stories still to be told about the events of the last four years that history will find just as damning as today’s public knowledge.
Trump’s defenders will respond that the scholars and journalists who claim the authority to write this history are fatally corrupted by hostile bias. It’s certainly true that these are collectively left-leaning professions, and that the Trump presidency treated both of these groups as political opponents from its earliest days. So what if we tried for a moment to give Trump the benefit of the doubt by attempting to evaluate his presidency as much as possible on its own terms? Did Trump succeed in achieving what he wanted to do, even if it wasn’t what others wanted him to do?
Recommended.
In 50 years—Trump: impeached, convicted, 400K dead
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/18/trump-presidency-administration-biggest-impact-policy-analysis-451479
30 Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed
Trump’s presidency may be best remembered for its cataclysmic end. But his four years as president also changed real American policy in lasting ways, just more quietly. We asked POLITICO’s best-in-class policy reporters to recap some of the ways Trump changed the country while in office, for better or worse.
Many Americans will remember President Donald Trump’s presidency as a four-yearlong storm of tweets, rallies and on-air rants that ended in a mob riot and historic second impeachment. But there was more to the Trump presidency than attention-hogging political drama and conflict; often unnoticed, Trump and his administration actually did succeed in changing some of the ways Washington works.
From imposing a ban on Chinese-made drones to rolling back rules on sexual harassment, from cracking down on robocalls to letting states legalize marijuana, Trump changed some key areas of federal policy in ways that may have lasting impact well after he’s gone.
But here’s the thing — between all the news coverage of the president himself, a global pandemic and various other upheavals, there’s a good chance you missed a lot of them. So here is POLITICO’s list of 30 important policy changes Trump made as president, how they’ve affected our lives, families and businesses, and the prospects they will survive the incoming Biden administration…
The linked Politico article in the above comment is really a funny read if you like irony. Among the Trump administrations brightest successes are those where they failed to enact their chosen policy adequately and then just turned their back and walked away. How’s that for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, even if it was mostly due to the law of unintended consequences?
[There have been a lot of Politico articles about Donald Trump. The linked article in my comment above was one of the most generous while still fair with the good and the bad within the context of current policy.
There are other perspectives in which to view a POTUS term. For the broader perspective of the historical context then no one is better than Ken Burns (IMO).]
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/534834-ken-burns-says-us-is-experiencing-fourth-great-crisis-in-its
Ken Burns says US is experiencing its fourth ‘great crisis’
By Zack Budryk – 01/19/21 02:00 PM EST
Documentarian Ken Burns said that the U.S. is in the midst of the fourth “great crisis” in its history as President Trump prepares to leave the White House.
“We’re beset by three viruses, are we not?” Burns said on NPR, citing “a year-old COVID-19 virus, but also a 402-year-old virus of white supremacy, of racial injustice. … And we’ve got an age-old human virus of misinformation, of paranoia, of conspiracies.”
Those three factors, he said, have contributed to the U.S.’s fourth major crisis, following the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II.
Burns went on to outline what he believed were reasons for optimism…
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[ more at link ]
This mountain in a beautiful national park in Arizona is being bulldozed for the border wall, which will cut off wildlife migration corridors and access to resources for many threatened and endangered species.
https://www.facebook.com/CenterforBioDiv/videos/666416170668088
this and delisting grizzly bear and grey wolf.
George,
On day 1.
“Border Wall Construction Halted: The wall was always a boondoggle, meant to say something but with no chance of actually achieving anything. Biden’s order to halt construction on the border wall along the southern border is, therefore, also symbolic, but a much needed symbol of policy-making sanity. The order includes the “immediate termination” of the state of emergency declared by Trump in order redirect funds to the construction project.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/biden-executive-actions-coronavirus-immigration-climate-who-daca-keystone.html
EMike,
Happy New Day.
Well, Hitler wanted to kill the Jews so, on his terms…
@SW,
Hitler? Really? How intellectual… oh, pardon me. How ineffectual. Like the mob that stormed the capitol on 1/6/21 thinking that somehow they could take over the US government, delusions of grandeur. They could not do the math either.
Ken Burns was wrong about one thing. Trump was not at all prepared to leave the White House, well not until after experiencing political cascade failure after 1/6/2021 self-humiliation mob. Trump was just another example of the STEM educational crisis in the US.