- Included among the Political Analysis Posts List.
- On every level, Trump is a disaster as a President. Also, there is no comparison to how great the economy was when Clinton and LBJ were in office.
Martin Winfree
November 30, 2018
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Shared with Public
Political Analysis, Part II:
My wife Peggy liked Trump a lot, as did many of her friends, and I actually had some hope early on (yeah, for about a minute 
) that he might possibly become a good President. Although most of his speech was the usual shit (and that goes triple for his mean-spirited inauguration speech), I remember well the point in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention when he said: “Only weeks ago in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by terrorists. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens.” After the crowd roared in approval (that was at least as surprising to me as what Trump said), Trump added: “I must say, as a Republican it’s so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.” I remember thinking that maybe Trump really could be a different kind of Republican, someone I could admire and support, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, say, or a plain-speaker like John McCain.
When I woke up the day after the election to find out that Trump had pulled off an upset of Truman proportions, what I remember thinking, not all that unhappily, was: “I’ll be damned, Trump actually did it!” It didn’t take long at all for Trump to . . . I was going to say “confirm my worst fears”, but even that doesn’t begin to describe it. On every level, Trump is a disaster as a President. True, we are having what passes for a good economy when the Republicans are running things – but there is no comparison to how great the economy was when Clinton and LBJ were in office.
It didn’t have to be this way. Trump is famously all about Trump, Trump and more Trump; and the GOP was wide open for him to do anything he wanted to do with it. There is probably no one in our lifetimes who has come into office as President with such a blank slate, or with such a believable argument that he was going to do things differently. But he hasn’t even been able to manage simple competence – while Trump has had a few sharp women working for him (UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is/was the only person in the whole Trump administration that I like), the men have been an endless parade of dullards, and crooked dullards at that. Any hopes that we might have had that Trump would be more of a grown-up as a President than he was as a candidate have been disintegrated; if anything, he has been a lot worse.
Trump has cozied up to the worst elements in the Republican Party (Breitbart, etc., and whoever the Breitbart Jr. group is who just put together the doctored tape of the CNN reporter getting thrown out of the recent press briefing); he has stoked nationalist fears that weren’t even on the radar screen before he started in; and he has even said nice things about genuine Neo-Nazis.
I have seen it demonstrated on television more than once that the people Trump really goes after (those in the press, say) are invariably African Americans, Latinos, and/or women. Just as one example, the CNN reporter Jim Acosta whose White House credentials were recently pulled and later reinstated by court order is Hispanic. Our Presidents are often viewed with disdain by other world leaders, but I cannot remember any of them actually being laughed at during a speech at the UN – that happened to Trump not so long ago.