Off the Shelf

Goodbye Trump, you were a joke

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States who walked out of White House on Wednesday a very sad and bruised man trying to put up a brave face. In fact, Trump was a joke. He was never meant to be President of the United States of America in the first place.

In his brief farewell address to his supporters just before he boarded the plane for Florida, he promised to be back in some form after four years. He must be joking. I can’t imagine just how with all the mess he created he can come back.

Trump is a sad man for reasons he knows very well but will never acknowledge publicly. For one thing, he always overrated himself. In the same vein, from day one, he underrated his political opponents while also taking the American people for granted. He miscalculated his miraculous ascendance to the White House when after trailing Hilary Clinton by 3 million popular votes in 2016 he still won the presidency. Although his win was not a fluke, he simply did not know how to make the most of it.

During his four-year reign, no one can deny he did chalk some solid achievements to his credit. His achievements according to some analysts include concessions from the Universal Postal Union, the criminal justice bill and the fact that a few more countries now recognize Israel’s right to exist than before. 

But his critics say his failures were massive. They say he wanted to tame the budget deficit, but instead it ballooned to the largest deficit in history. He thought trade wars were good and easy to win. What they have actually done is triggered industrial recessions; got farms addicted to government welfare; yielded meager concessions from China, and in the end, that trade deficit also ballooned to the largest in history.

He demanded that America be respected in the world and, in the end, his secretary of state was snubbed by Luxembourg. His efforts to reverse Obama administration’s initiatives proved mostly fruitless. His “America First” policies hurt his base more than anyone else and alienated far more Americans than they attracted. Trump, they say, has so scrambled conservatism that Republicans are now calling for the state to force private companies to do what they want.

Trump’s critics further remind him about the 400 000 people who have died in 14 months in the reeling Covid-19 pandemic under his watch; the massive protests, excessive use of force and a violent insurrection fomented at the Capitol Hill last week. They say all these stand in stark contrast with what he pledged on his inauguration day four years ago when he declared: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” But the US is in a far worse state in almost every dimension, they say.

They also remind about more promises he made: “We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation.” But those promises stand unfulfilled, and Trump barely made the effort to try.

They argue his legacy will be the most gruesome vista of American carnage since the Civil War. And no amount of retconning will alter that truth. They also say from his character flaws, Trump was never meant to be president of the United States in the first place. I cannot agree more.

Trump plotted his own downfall, and rebuilding his political career will be a miracle. 

His biggest undoing is his failure to accept that he fairly and squarely lost the elections to political nemesis Joe Biden. From that denial he peddled lies which he could not substantiate. He then went on to incite riots to validate his conspiracy theories about his election victory claims.

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