People often get mad at me — for all kinds of things actually but for the sake of this essay let’s go with — when I would say that George W. Bush was actually a much worse president than Donald John Trump. I often say Jessica for his middle name just to be funny, but since he is an actual John many times over in the colloquial usage of the word, we’ll go with that today. So anyway people would think I was crazy and they would usually think that I was somehow diminishing what a terrible example of a human being Trump is, when on the contrary I was just making the point that him being so awful at everything he does made him also thankfully inefficient in his ability to do lasting damage. Until now, that is, but the trump administration of 2017 was very much different.
Unlike George W. Bush and his team, who were great at doing lasting damage. We’re still living with the damage they caused today because they damaged America in ways that proved difficult to reverse. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about Bush then you already know the list. But, for the sake of argument, let’s do a very short recap. If Bush had never been President we would have never had the endless intractable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we wouldn’t have tripled the military budget, we would have balanced or drastically reduced our debt, we would have started tackling climate change twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have had the financial crash which in turn caused the housing shortage, we wouldn’t have had the No Child Left Behind disaster, we would have shored up Social Security so it wouldn’t be running out in seven years or so—The list goes on and on and on. But the point is that all of this was very hard to unwind, and while Obama could and did tackle some of it, he barely scratched the surface. Especially by not taking the Bush administration to task for green-lighting torture which violates our international agreements and by misleading the American public into the Iraq war. And then, of course, Obama failed to bail out the middle class instead of the banks after the Great Recession. Those two things could have helped mitigate the disaster of Bush, the former by calling out the lawless nature of the Bush administration, which many human rights groups at the time were calling for, and the latter by proving that the government can help the middle class in times of crisis and not just protect the wealthy. But, O’bummer, I can say a lot about how the Obama administration failed us but he is still by far not the worst president we’ve ever had. So far that’s probably Bush — so far, but probably not for long.
So that brings me back to the John, oh my bad, the Donald. The John is more apropos. So was Trump the worst President of all time? In many ways he was, he mismanaged COVID, he was rightly impeached twice, he destroyed the deficit with tax cuts for the rich, was a disaster for climate initiatives, he destroyed norms that hold our society together—the list could really go and on. But most of what he did could be reversed, unlike Bush what Bush left us with. After Trump we were able to stabilize pretty quickly that first time around and we largely could have gotten ourselves back on track if Biden wasn’t such a, how can I say this, hmmm, let’s go with true to doing what Biden does best. Screwing things up. Yes, he did great stuff in that first two years, not his ideas, but he embraced them, and I gave him plenty of praise for it. And then he did what he does best, he screwed it all up. He’s like the opposite of a clutch player.
So here we are, and now Donald John Trump has a chance to take the reigns of being the worst president in American history from George W. Bush, and he’ll likely do it this time and probably by a light year or so. And that takes me to all of this bullshit I keep hearing from all of these bullshit artists that surround Trump. The said bullshit goes something like this:
You have to root for Trump to succeed because why wouldn’t you want America to succeed?
Okay buster, settle down and don’t tell us to conflate Trump succeeding with America succeeding, they’re actually quite contrary to one another. The reality is I don’t want Trump and his cronies to succeed at what they’re saying they want to do because it will be the worst thing to happen to America since George W. Bush, and as I said, it will probably make that era pale in comparison. And worst of all, this time it likely won’t be easy to reverse. The future isn’t written in stone but given how much our institutions have already crumbled I think we need to recognize that the Trump administration might very well succeed in what they are setting out to do. And if they do, it could take decades to recapture what many of us accept as normal. If we ever do, that is.
So what are they going to do you might ask? Well, here’s a short list of what Trump and his now appointees and those around him are saying. By the way, none of this is new, this has been said all along. And like I said, this isn’t inevitable, it’s just what they define as success. Take a read and then you can tell me if any of this will be good for America.
So here goes, this is all the stuff that they talk openly about in interviews and at rallies and at their conventions.
They want to drill baby drill, and even though we’re producing the most oil we’ve ever produced they want more. And that means gutting the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and they want to open up all federal lands to more drilling, including the National Parks. They’ll likely start with the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Also, to quickly achieve this stuff they have legal teams in place to attack environmental groups. You can’t undo trashing the National Parks and the environment.
They want an end to all of the climate change initiatives, they think it’s nonsense and they don’t want any new agreements or any new initiatives and they want to roll back everything Biden put in place. If you think Elon Musk cares, think again. He’ll still sell electric cars, it’s just that the electricity they’ll run on will be very dirty electricity. So effectively America having any sort of a leading role in Climate mitigation is over and given our influence it likely means a global trend to stop trying. The next step? Terraforming, that’s what’s being talked about. In order to continue mass consumption were going to start an arms race in terraforming and in my mind, that’s when we really begin to screw up the environment. Because these aren’t smart careful people in charge, they think the market can solve it. You know, the market, it can solve anything, it never causes problems like mass wealth inequality or mass homelessness or restricted access to healthcare or destroying our environment. Oh, wait, my bad, the market actually caused all of that. Well, I’m too lazy to rewrite that part so I’m moving on.
They want to prosecute their political opponents and take over local elections to ensure they’ll win all future elections. I didn’t lead with this one because everyone always says, No Waaay! Well, all I can say is, Waaay! It’s not funny, they’ve already started.
Besides prosecuting their political enemies they also want to decimate the DOJ and military leadership of anyone who isn’t a Republican loyalist, or currently, a Trump loyalist. If they’re successful, this could lead to the largest brain drain of qualified personnel in these agencies than we’ve ever seen and frankly make us drastically less safe. Take 9/11 for one example, the transition from Clinton to Bush left pockets of blindspots that allowed the Bush DOJ to miss the clues of 9/11. Mainly because they didn’t take seriously the outgoing administration’s warning that national security threats from abroad should be a top priority. Ashcroft didn’t think so and in the shuffle, many obvious warnings went unheeded. Imagine what could happen when chuckleheads like Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard start mucking up the machinery on behalf of Trump’s half-cocked conspiracy delusions?
They want to unleash AI and leave it in the hands of the private market completely unregulated, including stripping out guardrails that Biden implemented to ensure that it doesn’t increase bias in the workplace as it’s already proven to do. Trump has appointed David Sacks to be the Crypto and AI czar. David co-authored a book with Peter Thiel called The Diversity Myth where, among many other things, they characterized date rape as women later regretting consensual sex and called the natives that Colombus met noble savages. David hates diversity, he rants about it all of the time.
They want to take away non-profit status from groups that fight for human rights, environmental rights, labor rights, and anyone they feel gets in the way of their agenda.
They have plans to restrict access to the airwaves and attack news organizations with lawsuits like they already did with ABC, who backed down pretty quickly even though every legal scholar said ABC would have likely won the case. They also plan to defund PBS and NPR. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance have invested in Rumble, Trump owns Truth Social and Musk owns X, these are some of the largest disinformation platforms around. Couple that with the dark money funding of thousands of right-wing news websites posing as legitimate or the takeover of local TV news by the Sinclair group or the well-funded right-wing blogosphere and it should be obvious that right-wing propaganda is poised to literally drown out any semblance of the truth. Reality is already on the ropes and this new Trump administration has the expertise and the plans to make sure it stays down for the count.
They plan on further gutting Social Security, every proposal they have will only weaken the likelihood that it will last another decade or two in any meaningful way. And they are openly talking about it being on the chopping block like never before.
They want to turn all of Medicare into a for-profit healthcare system like Medicare Advantage. Which by the way is largely managed by United Health, the most successful insurance provider in denying claims.
They want massive tax cuts for the wealthy, exploding the deficit and making it harder to provide services that the middle-class and the poor depend on.
And that brings me to DOGE, which I think is short for douchebags making decisions that will destroy the middle class as we know it. Something like that. What can they do? This is a great case study of whether they can achieve any of this stuff. I don’t know, but the king of the douchebags Elon (I used to not have hair) Musk famously said, and I’m paraphrasing here but this is the gist, that budget cuts might cause short-term severe hardship but they’ll let the U.S. economy take off like never before. You know, like before any worker’s rights, or environmental rules or anything inconvenient like that. It’ll be great I’m sure.
So I can go on and on, and I haven’t mentioned detainment camps for immigrants, or what this means for education, or what this means for human rights, but rest assured straight down the line it’s as bad as this thing can get. Which brings me back to George W. Bush, who could very likely be knocked down a peg in his status as the worst president of all time. Donald John Trump could very likely take the mantle of the worst President producing the worst long-lasting effects on America than anyone in our history. And that’s saying a lot.
I hope I’m wrong, but I wouldn’t count on it. These things don’t run on auto-pilot, if our institutions are going to hold it’s because there was an army of people fighting to protect them and an informed public that understands the stakes.