Trump was the worst President in U.S. History.
I would say second-worst after Andrew Jackson. Hard to beat genocide in order to make a massive land grab.
Trump/Kushner did try to weaponize the COVID response against blue regions that voted Democrat. That’s pretty bad
Personally, I’m very bitter about the completely awful effects of Reagan’s tenure. Literally turned the office into a Hollywood act; you know damn well he wasn’t calling the shots. He was there to draw people’s attention.
He also defunded 99% of American science to pour billions into a hole in Texas that never had a chance of working.
Ever notice how all major breakthroughs these days come from non-US scientists? The scene never recovered.
Let’s not forget the “war on drugs” as well. A lot of awful things came from the Reagan era.
Tbh Andrew Johnson (became president after Lincoln was assassinated) is pretty high up there, too. I might actually put him ahead of Trump in terribleness, because a lot of the regressive societal shit we are dealing with now - and have been dealing with for around 150 years - can be directly attributed to Johnson’s softball treatment of the Confeds during reintegration.
Trump activity attempting to overthrow the Federal Government pushes him beyond Jackson. Moving the Southeast Tribes to Oklahoma was a fall out of the War of 1812 against the Tribes who joined the British. It doesn’t remove how horrible that was. Moving so many people during a pandemic of Yellow Fever was inexcusable. Obviously Jackson didn’t care.
I still think Trump attempts to overthrow the government is worse as well as losing 20 million jobs, making the Covid pandemic worse by inaction, and all his criminal activity.
Trump activity attempting to overthrow the Federal Government pushes him beyond Jackson.
I doubt most indigenous Americans would agree.
The difference for me comes down to the relative power both men had. If the US had been the sole hyperpower on the planet, Jackson may well have out-Hitlered Hitler. If Trump’s administration wasn’t actively engaged in sabotaging his deranged orders to attack Venezuela and Iran, we’d probably still be at war. Trump exercised authority over 300M people and has, probably for the remainder of our lifetimes, permanently altered politics in the US and around the world, while Jackson’s ability, monster that he was, was constrained that the US was not a significant world power at the time.
I’m surprised at the amount of disagreement your comment is getting.
I don’t want to downplay Jackson’s displacement of American Indians, but there was one real FUBAR thing Jackson did that no one remembers:
He paid off the national debt.
Completely and entirely. The federal government existed debt free for some months (I forget exactly how long, I want to say it was a year or so before borrowing exceeded income).
On the face of it, this probably sounds like a good thing, but it hard crashed the economy. Obv wasn’t alive at the time, but it’s my understanding that it was the worst economic disaster until the Great Depression (and The Great Depression was only worse because the country and world were far more connected than the world of Jackson’s day).
That said, I hear inauguration party was a real rager.
Let’s be clear though, it wasn’t because of his economic policy, it was his thorough mishandling of covid that got one million Americans killed which was the problem.
And the fact the whole world shut down for a few months. I’m sure that had something to do with it.
Which could have been drastically mitigated to an extent if he actually got his base to jump on board and support the vaccine and mask agenda. It wouldn’t have spread anywhere near the extent that it did, nor would we have had the need to shut so many things down and isolate.
His mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, and his anti-sciencw rhetoric really screwed things up. Hell, there’s still ignorant loons out there that think COVID was a lie and that the vaccines are just for the government to inject a world-ending virus that will get triggered by 5G signals when the Global Cabal decides to end the World. It’s absolutely comical.
Also wasn’t he sorta directly responsible for it in the first place? US for years maintained pandemic response labs in high-risk areas, like around the notorious wet-markets in Wuhan, that he shuttered early in his term. We were explicitly looking out for that kind of thing to catch it before it became a global issue, but he thought it cost too much.
nor would we have had the need to shut so many things down and isolate.
I’m not so sure. In my province we had very good mask use and vaccine uptake (once we could get them), but we still went back into lockdown, after our initial long ass lockdown, due to case loads still being too high.
Masks and vaccines did help of course, but are not a guarantee things will stay open.
I’m not saying he didn’t screw the pooch. I’m just saying the whole world economy took a huge hit which clearly was due to the COVID lockdowns. I’m not saying they weren’t needed and we absolutely should have done everything we did. But to pretend it was all Trump’s fault is showing just as much brain power that he does.
I mean yeah, Trump can’t be blamed for COVID, but his response to it is another matter entirely.
Over 1 million dead. That’s a pretty damn big chunk of the population to lose in the space of two years.
Now I’m not saying he’s alone in the blame, there are state level republicans responsible too, but boy did he try to hamstring those who were trying to do the right thing.
If I looked purely at his actions, I’d say that he wanted COVID to be some great filter or something to wash through the masses and take out lots of people.
I mean, in South Africa we have a famously corrupt and incompetent government. And even we significantly outperformed the US in deaths per 100k people.
It does help to have publicly funded healthcare.
It isn’t just about his reactive actions to the pandemic.
His proactive efforts to hasten the pandemic is more damning.
May, 2018:
https://x.com/atomicanalyst/status/994696175575068672?s=46&t=g3yM8UdEINqcLyXIxWs-lg
I think they handled it all according to the plan. It allowed them to sow distrust in everyone from doctors just trying to save people’s lives, to the very government he was in charge of. It basically set the hook for his cult of “you can only trust me”. And his cult believes that millions are going to die from the vaccine, and at the same time that people dying from COVID is “fake news”.
Indeed. I wish we could just trade him a pardon for all his crimes, and in exchange he must take his cult and all move to some remote place where they will be separated from the rest of the world. He can live out his remaining days as some god, and his cult members can stop messing up society for the rest of us. Ah, to dream.
More significantly yes but let’s not forget the massive tax cuts and regulation destruction he did
I don’t that his brainless decisions regarding economic policy did anything but make it worse.
Remember his trade wars with…everyone? And then he renegotiated the same agreements but worse?
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but the man didn’t do anything without the combination of someone telling him to do it and somehow that thing being made worth his while.
So, why the hell would he decide/be-told to disband the US Pandemic Response team in May 2018?
https://x.com/atomicanalyst/status/994696175575068672?s=46&t=g3yM8UdEINqcLyXIxWs-lg
Apparently, Trump had a beef with his National Security advisor, and that advisor was good friends with the admiral in charge of the pandemic office. So, to punish the Advisor, Trump closed down his buddy’s office.
It’s all so petty. And people still want this person to have power. Society is so confusing.
I think Trump did a horrible job and his COVID response was probably the single worst possible part of his administration, but I do wonder, what difference would a Clinton response have made with how everything played out? Certainly there likely wouldn’t have been as much panic and misinformation spreading, BUT right-wingers would still have called the whole thing a left-wing hoax and had been just as vigilant against masking up and taking precautions as under Trump, maybe even worse under Clinton.
If anything, I wonder if we wouldn’t have delayed how widespread COVID would have been throughout the US, like how we saw with China experiencing a surge in COVID cases after they opened back up, well after everyone else had already been through the worst of it. COVID doesn’t really care who’s in charge, it’s more akin to a natural disaster and still may have played out the same way, once the genie was out of the bottle, it wasn’t going back in. Maybe the numbers of dead Americans would have been significantly less, but I’m not sure what could’ve been done differently by the medical establishment to save lives. Obviously preventing infections in the first place would’ve been the best defense, but assuming it was always going to be an out-of-control pandemic and all those that got infected were going to get infected at some point, could doctors have treated those patients differently and actually saved more lives? I’m guessing we learned alot after those first few chaotic months when the outbreak first happened, so we probably do have better treatments now, and maybe we would’ve gotten those sooner under a less stupidly malicious administration.
Says “I’m not sure what anyone could have done better” while explicitly stating several things that probably would have been done better by someone else 🤦
But my gas and eggs are so expensive now and I still have to pay my student loans, surely Biden is the worst president ever?
He certainly didn’t help, but I think it would’ve been the worst Economic record in modern U.S. history no matter who you put at the helm.
It’d be like blaming any one person for The Great Depression, it was gonna hit either way by the time it happened, whoever was there could only mitigate it.
Though again, he did nothing to help it, and probably did exacerbate the issues…
Anyone else in charge wouldn’t have dismantled pandemic response teams, sold off emergency medical supplies for cash, and dragged their feet on testing and containment, all of which contributed to an epidemic turning into a pandemic. So no. Anyone else would probably not have done just as poorly.
