Quite a long post, but
a good record of the awful person Trump was in office.
Remember in February
2016 when Trump cheered as he won the NV GOP primary saying in part which groups
gave him the win and interjected that even the poorly-educated help him saying:
“I love the poorly educated.”
That short video clip is here:
That view persists today – just listen to and watch his base – they can’t get enough of him – why since his 4 years in office was a total disaster.
He gave us and the
world turmoil, destruction, uncertainty and insurrection on January 6. Below is
compiled a list of is awful decisions and statement from CNN, the LA TIMES, and
numerous other reliable sources is a history of his destruction.
As CNN
notes, it will take a lot more than
an election for America to regain the trust of its allies after four years of
the most norm-shattering presidency in our history.
He has conversely
praised dictators, tyrants, and autocrats: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and of course the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman Al Saud (aka: MBS).
He withdrew the U.S. from many international
agreements and he questioned the relevance of international institutions that have
historically relied on America's political and financial support.
He rocked confidence in the US-led international order to such an extent that experts fear the damage done to global democratic norms could take decades to restore (e.g., NATO, the UN, the EU, the Paris Accord, the Iran Nuclear deal, and the WHO, etc.)
He from befriending autocratic strongmen to undermining
multi-national institutions, and even questioning the legitimacy of American
democracy, he presided over a deliberate shift in the reliability of Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill concept of American leadership.
Political experts around
the globe have said:
He normalized things that were taboo. If any other Western
leader acted like Trump, they'd be marginalized.
He behaved with complete disregard for the institutions and
norms that rely on good faith and trust in the international community.
Undercutting that will be Trump's lasting legacy.
He congratulated authoritarians for winning unfair elections, and even calls genuine dictators his friend(s). That gives those leaders the propaganda
win of an endorsement from the supposed moral leader of the world.
He combined those endorsements into reducing the U.S. presence
on the world stage and created space for strongman to behave even more
aggressively at home and internationally.
His actions have the direct and immediate impact of reducing
the effectiveness of multilateralism.
He pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization (WHO) right in in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, accusing it of working with China. That risks destroying the long-term credibility of international bodies in dealing
with global crises with us.
He pulled the U.S. out of treaties like the Paris climate
accord. That reduces the international community's ability to ask a country
to stop chopping down trees. If the U.S. is no longer a stakeholder, why should
anyone else be?
He then wiped the U.S. out of good, strong, and working Iran nuclear
deal.
Specific examples of
Trump's apparent disdain for democracy can be seen in his admiration for
autocrats and authoritarians:
He has called the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia a friend
of mine who is doing a “really spectacular job.” FYI: Saudi citizens do not
get to vote and are ruled by a royal family who have spent decades presiding
over human rights abuses.
When Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was brutally murdered by a Saudi hit
squad, Trump gave the Crown Prince a pass, saying the Middle East was a vicious, hostile place.
He has called North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un a real leader with whom “he gets on really well.” North Korea is probably the worst example of a dictatorship on earth, with dissidents imprisoned in gulags and opponents per formatively executed by a ruling family who are deified in state media. Trump's love of strongmen doesn't stop with dictators.
He has applauded authoritarians in pseudo or partial
democracies.
He congratulated Russia's President Vladimir Putin and
Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan on electoral triumphs that were declared by
international electoral observers to be lacking
in genuine competition and not fought fairly, respectively. In the case of
Turkey, the vote was a constitutional referendum which handed Erdogan sweeping
new powers. After Russia meddled in the 2016 US election, Trump repeatedly
refused to condemn Putin and now he is Russia's president for life.
He at a G7 summit referred to Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi – a key U.S. ally long accused of human rights abuses, as my favorite dictator.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Below is from the LA
TIMES and some examples from the above references may be duplicated:
He has insulted and alienated the nation’s friends and
allies, rendering the democratic world leaderless.
He flirted with repudiating NATO, a mutual defense
commitment that has kept the planet free from worldwide war and destruction
since the end of World War II, and has done so at a time when Russia has
exhibited increasing aggression by occupying territory of neighboring Ukraine,
interfering in elections in the United States and Europe, and sending assassins
to Britain to poison a former Russian spy.
He has cozied up to right-wing nationalist dictators and
autocrats at a moment when citizens of faltering democracies and the many
peoples around the world aspiring to freedom most need an advocate on the
international stage.
He has rejected the honorable American presidential
tradition of seeking unity and instead has indulged in the politics of
division, willfully alienating a large segment of the American electorate while
among his own supporters drumming up hatred for and suspicion of others.
He has transformed the White House, which should promote
policies based on reality, into the world capital of ignorance, dishonesty and
misinformation by reciting verifiable falsehoods, from the size of his
inauguration crowd to the direction of a hurricane to the (disproven)
prevalence of election fraud.
He has been a particular antagonist to California, seeking
to undermine this state’s forward-looking policies on auto emissions and
environmental preservation, spreading falsehoods about the causes of its deadly
wildfires, disparaging its rational and humane approach to immigration
challenges, demeaning it for its struggles to deal with homelessness, and
offering instead purported solutions that are unworkable, nonsensical or cruel.
He has denied the existential challenge of climate change
and has promulgated policies that weaken the nation’s role in fighting it and
scuttle the nation’s ability to take economic leadership in low-emission and
carbon-capturing technology.
He has made the United States unreliable, erratic and
foolish in international affairs by disparaging its diplomatic corps, engaging
in frequent and jarring changes in foreign affairs and defense advisors and
repudiating international allies and partners.
He has made light of verified Russian assaults on U.S.
elections, and at his shameful Helsinki news he said he believed Russian
President Vladimir Putin over his own nation’s intelligence agencies.
He failed to elicit from the Russian leader an apology for
past intervention or a promise not to intervene in other elections. In so
doing, he invited further, more comprehensive attacks — and failed in the most
basic duty of any U.S. president, which is to protect and defend the United
States.
He has reduced or eliminated independent science advisory
panels in a quest to remove fact from policymaking when it collides with
damaging policies he wishes to pursue.
He has demeaned the presidency with foul, angry language
hurled at his political adversaries, replacing fireside chats and presidential
addresses with cable-TV-fueled, stream-of-consciousness tweets that attack his
critics and stoke fear and outrage in his supporters.
He has undercut the nation’s moral standing by his shrugging
response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi operatives.
He has sullied the office of the presidency by using it to express his personal contempt for people he does not like or who do not support him.
The most egregious example may be his treatment of the late Sen. John McCain, a
much-decorated former Vietnam War prisoner whose honor Trump questioned even
after McCain’s passing even had said earlier “I don’t like people who were
captured.”
Trump meant of course, in
Trump-speak, that John McCain on that fateful October 26, 1967 day somehow had planned
and intended to be shot down, be badly wounded, captured, and then held as a
POW for 5 and a half years in Hanoi North Vietnam.
He has appealed to the basest part of our culture, lifting
into the mainstream chords and currents of racism that had long been left to
fester in only our darkest corners.
He commented on the deadly white nationalist rally in
Charlottesville, VA with an equivocating speech that shrank from condemning
violent racism and promoted false equivalency among demonstrators for and
against white supremacy.
He put in place a program to deny visas to visitors from
majority Muslim nations.
He disparaged Latinos; called Haiti, El Salvador, and
African nations “shïthølë countries,” and then expressed his preference for immigrants
from Norway (mostly from a white nation, I suppose).
He promoted the notion that one’s American-ness is a
function of descent and not birth or naturalization, by saying non-US-born
members of Congress should “go back to the countries from which they came.”
BTW Mr. Trump: Sen. Ted
Cruz (R-TX) was born in Canada as well all
of these members listed here: 5 Sen. and 28 Rep. – oops.
He has issued statements that in the aggregate define an
America united not by law, the Constitution, liberty, or justice but by racial
heritage.
More than any president in living memory, Trump has cheapened his office, instilled distrust in essential institutions of justice and democracy and replaced knowledge and professionalism with ignorance and amateurism.
This partial list represents a mere slice of what makes Donald J. Trump
unacceptable as president of the United States and what makes it of utmost
importance that Americans of all political parties and positions reject and
replace him (we did on November 3, 2020). Now look at the train wreck that
persists with him because he can’t accept losing like other presidents always
have.
My 2 cents: With all that
has Trump damaged us entirely? Yes, and no, but time will tell since he is
still at his post-2020 election loss craziness.
This point may serve as a marker:
While trying to overturn
the results of the 2020 election, even Trump-appointed judges made decisions
that thwarted Trump’s attempts at denying the election results.
For instance, Judge
Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee on the 3rd Circuit, for
the three-judge panel in PA wrote:
“Free, fair elections are
the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling
an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations
and then proof. We have neither here.”
Factually, Trump’s post-election
legal team (Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and yes, even the “My
Pillow” guy, et al) brought
62 lawsuits and won one (that actually didn’t matter). The others Trump
either dropped or lost. Plus, many of those court decisions were made by
Republican judges.
But, perhaps his biggest
disappointment had to be the Supreme Court’s decision not to even hear election
challenges from states Trump he believed and claimed that he had won.
Yep, that's Donald J. Trump – the sooner he is
indicted, tried, convicted, and sent off to jail the better for everyone (except
his radical base – wise to keep a close eye on them in the meantime).
Thanks for stopping by.
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