Trumpists are adept at rewriting history. Trump's term in office ended with him undermining trust in the electoral system for half the year, capped off with over two months of efforts to overturn the results. Just weeks before the inauguration a crowd of his supporters violently stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral votes affirming Biden as president. Despite no credible evidence to support these claims, Trumpists, led by Trump himself, are still insisting that the election was "stolen". And they've been gearing up for this year's election by insisting that the Democrats will attempt to "steal" this election as well.
Trumpists often assert that he was the only president in 20 years (or 30, or 40, depending on the day) to not preside over our country being involved in war. While it's true that he didn't start any new ones (neither did Obama, Clinton, Carter or Reagan) we were still enmeshed in Afghanistan throughout his whole term. We supported the Iraqi Army and the Kurds in the fight to eliminate ISIS. (If we weren't at war, how could he brag that he defeated ISIS?) His sycophants also claim that the world was a safer place and there weren't wars breaking out all over, like in Ukraine, when he was president. Russia had attacking eastern Ukraine in an attempt to annex two majority Russian-speaking provinces; there had always been unrest and violence in Israel regarding Gaza (although not to the current scale). He had a high-ranking Iranian general assassinated. Special Forces operators were killed in Niger.
Trump, despite his inauguration speech featuring "American carnage" inherited a mostly peaceful, prosperous nation. Employment was rising, the stock market was climbing, inflation was low and there were no threats from without for three years. Metrics that had been climbing steadily as we recovered from the recession that Obama inherited continued to climb. For three years there was no significant crisis for Trump to deal with; he could concentrate on devising insulting nicknames and rage tweeting. When a significant crisis finally arrived on the scene in early 2020 he downplayed it, blamed his predecessor (who had left him a detailed plan for dealing with a pandemic) and, as was his habit, made it all about him. Instead of confidently leading he refused to take any role in attacking the problem, leaving implementation of any Covid strategy to the states, and then criticizing states' actions. He undermined his own team of experts and constantly made rosy predictions (15 cases and it will be gone; when the weather warms up - it will be gone by Easter) and his ignorant suggestion that injecting disinfectant was a possible cure. (Critics often mistakenly misquote him as saying "inject bleach, his supporters jump on this as proof that critics don't know what they're talking about. As if disinfectant injections are somehow better than bleach). To his credit he worked with the pharmaceutical companies to fast track the creation of a vaccine, but set the nation up for ant-vax hysteria by not forcefully promoting vaccinations. He was more focused on the fact that the post-election release of the vaccine meant that he couldn't benefit from it in the November voting. Always about him.
To be fair, the pandemic was a situation where it would have been virtually impossible to steer a course that would have simultaneously protected public health, children's education and business. No one knew what was going to happen next, and add to the chaos the eruption of protests (and some riots) in the wake of George Floyd's killing. Do we keep businesses open and risk more transmission, or close them and risk people losing their livelihood? There was no right answer, and in retrospect, some of the answers turned out to be harmful. But when you have a narcissist in charge, the public relations optics of solving a problem become more important than actually solving the problem.
Trump, despite his insistence that he always hired the best people, has a long track record of characterizing people who left his administration as "losers". One thing I noticed about his selection process was that it resembled more a regular job interview, or even a contest, than selecting public servants who will be best for a very important job. In previous administrations you didn't "apply" to be a Cabinet Secretary. You might signal some interest, or your chief of staff might put together some promising possibilities for you. Trump process looked more like a cross between "The Apprentice" and a job fair at the local high school, with him talking about finalists and one again..."losers". The most obvious disability in Trump's process was that he selected for loyalty to him above all else. Of course you want your team to have a sense of loyalty. You can't have your top people trying to undermine you. But the loyalty should be primarily to the country, and to the office of the president. He wasn't the first president to overvalue personal loyalty, but he was so utterly transparent about it, and the loyalty only went one way.
Trumpists like to mock Democrats by claiming that our main objection to Trump is "mean tweets". It's true that Trump's prolific tweeting was a focus of the opposition. Not because they were simply "mean", but that his tweets, along with his rally rants, were a clear indicator of his mindset. It was in his tweets where he targeted his enemies, literally calling groups like the media "enemies of the people". It was in his tweets where he turned on his former appointees in a storm of insults. It was in his tweets where his thin skin and his inability to admit that even his most far fetched assertions could be wrong. (The storm path Sharpie wasn't on Twitter - but the principle is the same) The tweets told us who he was. He somehow claims that he was a uniter, while his tweets and other public statements indicate clearly that to him, being a unifier means categorizing those who disagree with him as not "true" Americans, so that what he considers the real Americans are united behind him.
One of the areas where Trump can claim better results than Biden is immigration through the southern border. It is inarguable that the number of illegal crossings and asylum claims is significantly higher now than it was under Trump. It is a fact that our system is wholly unprepared for the number of people who want to move here and we simply don't know how to process them. This, however, is not simply a Biden problem, it is a government problem, which currently includes both Democrats and Republicans. Trump and the Republicans seems more interested in the problem continuing in order for it to remain a campaign issue.
Let's not forget the 91 indictments against Trump and the civil cases he has already lost. Trump voters want you to believe that the various cases against him are a political hit job. That he is being targeted in order to take him off the ballot. This ignores (1) the fact that, even if convicted and in jail he could still be elected president and (2) should we ignore criminal activity just because he's running for president? His defenses in some of these cases give you tremendous insight into his thinking. He thinks he can declassify documents just by thinking about them, that he has immunity for any otherwise illegal acts, that overturning an election is part of his official duties. The things he has been indicted for are actions that he committed in broad daylight, there's no question that he did what he did, meanwhile the Republicans are searching frantically, with no success, for anything that Biden did that would warrant impeachment.
The battle cry of the Trump camp, lifted from Ronald Reagan, is to ask "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" I am. For one I'm not concerned that I'm going to catch some deadly disease and die. I'm aware of inflation, but I'm spending around the same amount for groceries every month than I did 4 years ago. Rent has gone up, but so has my pay rate. Personally, things are about the same. I'm not confident that Biden makes the right decisions all the time. But I'm more confident that he thinks about what is best for the country, while Trump only thought about what was best for Trump.
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