Ten years from now, after many of the American history books have been updated, historians will be holding seminars to do a post-mortem on the administration of President Donald J. Trump. The attendees at those events will be former Trump administration officials and dozens of people who had served during the Trump presidency. No longer employed by Trump, they will be free to tell their stories about serving one of the most unpredictable presidents in recent history, unless Citizen Trump attempts to block their living testimony.
Almost all of us know how Donald Trump got to the White House. As a television star followed by millions of Americans, Trump was able to ride that visibility into the Oval Office. The story of the 2016 campaign is a simple one. A well-known real estate developer captured the imagination of enough people, including Russian leader Vladimir Putin, to help him defeat his opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. From that point on, it is clear that as president Trump broke every rule that was followed by previous presidents.
The most recent past president to whom Trump could be compared is the late Richard Nixon. Nixon got to the White House with the support of many of the same people who elected Trump. The Republican Party under both presidents looked pretty much the same at the time they took office. Nixon eventually lost the backing of his party, but Trump has succeeded in turning a whole political establishment into a bunch of sycophants, at least for the short term.
Nixon left office under the cloud of possible impeachment. No one knows yet whether the current president will leave office a winner or be forced out of office. But there is no doubt that this presidency is the most mystifying one in recent times. Donald Trump had all the potential to have been a major success during his tenure. He could have successfully pushed through a major infrastructure bill, protected the health coverage of millions of Americans, made serious headway in the battle against global warming and could have gotten both political parties to agree to programs that would have made him a great champion of the common people.
But whether Mr. Trump serves four years or eight years, his presidency will be remembered as the most divisive experience in the past century. He will leave office with a bitterly divided country, years of litigation over the powers of the Congress and the executive branch and thousands of regulations that will for decades diminish the quality of life of millions of Americans born and unborn.
Those who benefited from his tax program will cheer him on to their dying days, but the vast majority of our citizens have been robbed of benefits that previous presidents of both parties fought to preserve. The now hollow Republican Party will have left America with trillions of dollars in deficits and our cherished Social Security and Medicare programs will be under assault in order to pay for long-term tax breaks for corporate America and deep pocket donors.
Students of history will be attempting to figure out how a president who enjoyed a booming stock market and low unemployment, continued to be rejected by a majority of the voting public. Advocates for women’s rights will point to his tenure as one of the worst periods in the history of their movement and will be struggling to undo countless laws that diminished their earning capacity and personal freedom. Immigrants desperately seeking a new life in America will be hampered by judges in countless courts who have little or no compassion for the lesser people.
Of all the mysteries of the Trump administration, none is worse than trying to unravel the reasoning behind his attempts to undermine the rule of law and denigrate people of all colors and races. Many of the personal character traits of this president were in no way visible when he chose to run for the highest office in the land. But with every passing day he takes his country and the level of discourse and drags it deeper and deeper into the gutter. Some future generations will no doubt sing the praises of the Trump years, but the historians will eventually be the ones who will tell us how deeply America had descended into a political abyss.
