If Trump Was President, Anyone Can Become President.
When I was growing up in the 1950’s, my parents told me that what made this country so great was that anyone could become President of the United States. And that statement turned out to be true in 2016. Because if you look back over the time that Donald Trump was in the White House, here’s a guy who made every single mistake that anyone could make.
He started off by claiming on Day 1 that his inauguration had attracted the largest crowd ever to see a President sworn in. Now the fact that his predecessor was the first Black President in a city whose more than a million Black residents could all walk down to the swearing-in ceremony and many of them did, would have made anyone else ask whether promoting the idea of the largest crowd to attend an inauguration was such a good idea.
So, from the beginning, the one thing you knew about Trump was that he would say whatever he said with the scantest regard for whether or not it was true.
He then almost immediately began lying about why he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, and even put together a Presidential commission to figure out how and why all the votes that were supposed to go into his column went the other way. The commission was quietly abandoned a short time later, but again the stench of his lying remained.
Then he did the craziest thing of all, which was to fire the head of the FBI, James Comey, when all he really should have done was ignore him and leave the whole Russian thing alone. For all his talk about how he was victimized by the ‘hoax’ investigation led by Robert Mueller, there would have been no Mueller if Comey had kept his job. Didn’t Trump have the slightest understanding of what happened to Nixon after he fired Archibald Cox? Guess not.
The second biggest flub, of course, was when he couldn’t bring himself to immediately and unequivocally denounce the Nazis who showed up in Charlottesville to hold a parade. And these weren’t just your garden-variety Nazis. These were guys who sauntered down the street waving their assault rifles and yelling anti-Semitic insults at the crowd.
The President of the United States doesn’t ever pause even for a second to try and figure out how to respond to a swastika displayed on a public street. And yet it took Trump several days to explain that his comment about ‘good people on both sides’ didn’t mean that he would ever say something that stupid again.
And by the way, when you look at the Gallup poll of the President’s performance from week to week, Trump hung around just under a 50% positive mark until he nosedived to 40% after Charlottesville, which is where he then stayed for the remainder of his term.
Then, of course, there was the Pandemic, and here was Trump’s biggest screw-up of all. How could he have ever made an opponent out of Anthony Fauci when doctors happen to be the only professionals that most people trust? Did he actually stop to think that most Americans would believe what he said about anything having to do with medicine or medical care against what the physician said who figured out a little virus known as AIDS?
For a guy who is allegedly going to run around the country promoting his kind of Republicans in 2022 and then run again for President in 2024, all of a sudden Trump’s public presence has begun to disappear.
Check out his website and see how many public events are coming up. Answer: None.
As for Trump’s views on Afghanistan, this was what he said today: “Biden’s biggest mistake was not understanding that the Military has to be last out the door, not first out the door. Civilians and equipment go first and then, when everyone and everything is out, the Military goes. So simple, and yet it wasn’t done. Tragic!”
Leonard Mermelstein could have come up with a more incisive and relevant statement. Leonard Mermelstein is my cat.
That all being said, I have a little bit of advice for my blue team friends.
Want to get another ‘anybody’ elected President in 2024? Run a Presidential campaign like the lousy campaign you ran in 2016.
