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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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“Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”
― James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
― James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.
The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.
As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.
None of this should come as a surprise. Some of us said, even before he became president, that Donald Trump’s Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering him, was his psychology—his disordered personality, his emotional and mental instability, and his sociopathic tendencies. It was the main reason, though hardly the only reason, I refused to vote for him in 2016 or in 2020, despite having worked in the three previous Republican administrations. Nothing that Trump has done over the past four years has caused me to rethink my assessment, and a great deal has happened to confirm it.
Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.
So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.
Presidents usually experience a poll bump after they leave office. George W. Bush, for example, nearly doubled his popularity rating between 2009 and 2018. If there is any justice in the world (admittedly a big if), that won’t happen with Donald Trump. If posterity needs any reminder of how awful he has been, all it will have to do is look at his final days in office. Trump has saved the worst for last — and there is still a month to go before he is evicted from the White House.
Trump’s singular focus since the election has been on overturning the results even at the cost of destroying U.S. democracy. For more than six weeks, Trump has been spewing conspiracy theories about nonexistent election fraud — claims that have been rejected in 59 court cases and counting, including by Trump-appointed judges.
While Trump is focused like a laser on his election grievances, he has all but checked out of the fight against a pandemic that has already claimed the lives of more than https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=lk_inline_manual_10 (316,000 Americans) and that is projected to kill more than 560,000 by April. This past March, after repeatedly claiming that the coronavirus would miraculously go away on its own, Trump said that if it killed fewer than 200,000 people, that would mean his administration has “done a very good job.” So he has failed by his own metric.
If future generations are tempted to romanticize the Trump presidency, all they will have to do is look at his final days to see why historians are likely to regard him as the worst president in U.S. history.
