Trump presidency in 6 words

It’s OK to talk about the Trump presidency in the past tense. An authoritarian demagogue from start to finish, Trump lost big Election Day. He’s down nationally 5.1 million votes on way to a six million plus deficit, and likely 74 votes in the Electoral College. He resurrected the Blue Wall of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He lost Georgia, Virginia and Arizona, states he should have won easily.

Trump never governed as a president to all the people. He governed solely for the 47% of Americans with grievances; some economic, some cultural, some racist and xenophobic. Many low information voters were merely transfixed by a talented demagogue. Virtually all hung in with him four years on.

He never worked to provide all Americans health care; indeed, he spent his presidency taking it away. He never once embraced a national strategy to combat pandemic, thrusting America to the top for the world’s worst response. 10,700,000 infected, 247,400 dead and spiking beyond our control will haunt him till the end of his days, if he’s even capable of being haunted.

He announced in 2015 with fear and loathing, campaigned with fear and loathing, governed with fear and loathing. Demonizing President Obama as an African was his way of calling him the N Word…and it worked. He trash talked his 15 rivals to win the 2016 nomination and they sat back stupefied as it worked. He degraded Hillary Clinton as the meanest of mean girls and it worked. He re-started his Nuremberg style campaign rallies in Week 1 and kept them up for the next 200 weeks, save for the two weeks recovering from covid he essentially gave himself with superspreader rallies and maskless White House events. He made the White House, with 34 infections and counting, the epicenter of irresponsible pandemic behavior.

It took America four years to remove the only other truly dangerous demagogue in my lifetime, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin in 1954. Compared to the damage Trump has wrought, McCarthy was an amateur. Unlike McCarthy, who slid away in an ocean of booze, Trump holds onto his messianic control of his 72,000,000 voters, jeopardizing our fragile political culture with a refusal to concede; not even assisting his certain successor to jump start solving monumental unsolved problems.

Summing up in 6 words? Trump was president; never was presidential.