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.
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.
Hey! How dare you insult my ultra American underground particle physics NASCAR stadium!
Why don’t you just admit already that the Earnhardt boson would’ve been way cooler than the “Higgs”?
Let’s not forget the “war on drugs” as well. A lot of awful things came from the Reagan era.
Including the gem “the most terrifying words in the English language: I’m from the government and I’m here to help!”
Not to mention that he changed economic policy to ensure the boomer generation will dominate all following generations.
If Drumpf gets a second term, I think he’ll be going for the high score.
Dismantling democracy would definitely put him over the top
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/Kushner did try to weaponize the COVID response against blue regions that voted Democrat. That’s pretty bad
I mean that’s just Republican standard operating procedure.
I mean, among the most evil maybe, but he was successful in what he did at least.
Can’t forget that Trump if anything killed millions not even because he was trying to, but outright negligence.
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.
Trump refused to fill any positions at BIA during his administration. He authorized the Keystone and Dakota Access through Tribal lands, both of which had massive spills that destroyed the land and ecosystem and permanently polluted the drinkable water. Trump withheld covid vaccines from being available on Tribal lands, a move that proved deadly to the Navajo Nation. Trump authorized the blasting of the sacred hills in Arizona’s Guadalupe Canyon to build his border wall. He repealed protections on Tribal land at Tongrass to authorize logging and mining despite Tribal leaders efforts to preserve their lands. Finally Trump ruthless stole 85 percent of Bear Ears Heard from the Navajo Nation in Utah to have uranium mining destroy the entire region.
You know what he didn’t do? Send huge numbers of indigenous Americans on a death march. I’m not sure why you think any of that is worse than literal genocide.
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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.
I’d say those two and Wilson are fairly neck and neck
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.
So far.
The amount of people here commenting authoritatively about this is disheartening.
Trump’s economic policies were insane. I remember looking at his campaign platform and seeing tax cuts everywhere and with no way to pay for anything.
I remember him shuttering valuable tools like the pandemic response teams because he wanted to tear down the success of previous administrations.
I still remember him mocking our military, displaying state secrets on national tv, trade wars that destroyed American jobs, diplomatic decisions that ruined international relationships.
I remember immigrant children locked in cages.
I remember the rule of law being absolutely trampled in order to achieve nothing. Just norms and institutions being torn down.
Trump accomplished nothing and made literally every facet of our government, politics and economic life worse.
He performed a political pump and dump and the entire world is still picking up the pieces.
He is a fascist and categorically the worst president we’ve ever had and every person here saying, “well actually…” should be ashamed.
While I agree I’d be careful with “I remember immigrant children locked in cages.” If you don’t want all the “ObAmA StArTeD iT aNd BiDeN CoNtInUeD!” comments lol
He is a fascist and the worst president we could’ve possibly had that didn’t commit straight up genocide.*
Removing children from parents is genocide.
No it’s not. The goal must be to exterminate the entirety of a group of people.
Being a cruel fascist piece of shit othering central americans by separating children - parents in detention centers then reuniting most of them isn’t genocide.
Forcible transferring of children from Ukraine may potentially violate multiple international law provisions.Footnote5 In its latest report, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that the transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia constitute violations of Article 147 of the Geneva Convention IV, Articles 74 and 85(4)(b)-(5) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, and Article 8(1) of the Convention of the Rights of the Child.Footnote6 On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued warrants of arrest for two individuals in the situation in Ukraine: President Putin and Commissioner L’vova-Belova for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under Articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute).Footnote7
International lawyersFootnote8 remain divided on extent to which Russia’s actions in Ukraine constitute genocide under any of the paragraphs of Article IIFootnote9 of the Genocide Convention.Footnote10 Predictably, the fundamental challenge lies with proving dolus specialis, a special intent to physically destroy the group, as required by the genocide definition.Footnote11
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10443894231200659
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-50
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2023.2228085
An example where it is but they aren’t necessarily killing every one of them?
Wow lol. Just have to be 100% right don’t you.
TL;DR.
Article 2 Subsection E: (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Wow lol. Just have to be 100% right don’t you.
-_-
I’m glad you know more than international lawyers who specialize in war crimes.
I’m glad you’re watering down geopolitical atrocities as some political gotcha instead of trying to understand the truth beyond propaganda sound bytes.
I’m not saying any of that lmao.
That’s literally one of the aspects of genocide as defined by the International Court of the Hague, lol.
Jesus, man. Smoke a joint or learn how to communicate better.
Weed and I have never mixed well lol. Most smoking for that matter. I blame living in households full of smokers for the first 18 years of my life. Thank god banning it in public buildings finally got around to being a thing in the USA.
And yes, it is, as I clarified to the proper context.
E: You can call a chicken a duck as much as you want. It doesn’t make them both a chicken just because they’re both poultry.
That can be an element of genocide, but you need more, otherwise we could say that putting kids into foster care is a type of genocide, which is silly.
I call this recency bias. Trump was terrible, but not the worst.
In your opinion, who is worse?
Fuck Woodrow Wilson.
At least Wilson was competent and qualified for the job.
Show this to any trump fan and they’ll just say:
“No, he didn’t”. And that’s it. You can’t reason with trump supporters.
Stock market went up! Best president ever!
Ok, the stock market is at a near record high right now, under Joe Biden. Does that mean Joe Biden is now the best president ever?
Nope. Why? Because [reason they just invented off the top of their head and will forget in five minutes].
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.
More significantly yes but let’s not forget the massive tax cuts and regulation destruction he did
I wish I’d bought a new washer/dryer before he pissed off China with that pointless trade war. Prices doubled overnight and have not come back down.
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 would love to not remember the entire four years; but I have to accept that the only chance to learn from it is to acknowledge that the shit did happen. Ugh.
Maybe it was worse, but with a sharpie pen. So there’s that.
“But why are there three copies? Which one is the real one?”
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.
These thoughts are not original to me.
The Boomers were mostly raised by people who’d survived the Depression and WW2. The parents were deeply scarred by those experiences and told the Boomers they had to be ‘tough.’ The Boomers grew up in a world of plenty, and never had any idea of what ‘tough’ really was. Men like Reagan and Trump, who built their image as ‘tough guys’ never got within a mile of actual combat. This is perfect for Boomers who spent their lives avoiding real conflict while thinking of themselves as bad ass pioneers.
The other thing is ‘Future Shock.’ A sociologist named Alvin Toffler and his wife wrote a book back in the 1970s. The idea of ‘future shock’ was that as the Industrial Age died and the Digital Era bloomed, a lot of people would be unwilling/unable to adopt to the changing world. They woudl try harder and harder to keep the past alive, even if it meant killing the future.
The Presidency essentially sharing storylines with any predictable, tween drama. That’s totally normal and ok…
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”.
It’s called cognitive dissonance and Putin is a master class at it…
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.
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.
Lmfao. I completely forgot that he got rid of the Pandemic Response Team. The absolute irony XD
It’s more fun to be like them. Clearly trump planned Covid. Starting with shutting down the response teams directly in the local area of the outbreak. How else could this have happened if our glorious leader didn’t have the foresight to shut down that response team!
/s
lol
Also, the research method that his base was all preaching about being how covid was created, and should have never been allowed, was only allowed to happen with US money/participation, due to Trump’s policy changes.
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 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.
That’s just embarrassing. I wish Conservatives felt shame.
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
To be fair, even if Trump did manage the pandemic like a sane person, the economy likely would’ve still taken a massive pandemic hit.
Other nations, with better public health policies and lower losses of life, also saw a bonkers hit to economic indicators.
You can’t say that about the rampant spending that took place during his administration. Conservative fiscal policy be damned!
They are only concerned with spending when they are not in power.
It’s been that way for years.
It’s classic Two Santas from the Republicans again.
Well, he got half of his term playing golf. If he had been all day in office I am sure that he’d tanked it even more.
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?
And my mother thought the same of Carter for the same reasons.
Because he’s a criminal mental invalid with followers of the same ilk.
At least he didn’t start a new war, beating, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and many more…
Keyword is “start”
You know they physically removed his presidential order to attack Venezuela, and that they’d frequently do similar tactics because he’d forgot that he signed an order that would have started a war, right?
First time i’ve heard of it, you got a link with that?
Here’s an article talking about his idea of attacking Venezuela. Here’s one that mentions how Woodward identified people removing docs from his desk because they created national security threats. That one is very short but there are longer and more detailed write ups. The Iran crack plan he ordered is well known, because it’s one of the top secret docs he showed to reporters.
But those are two separate events, you claimed that “they physically removed his presidential order to attack Venezuela”. None of those links claim that…
Syria was a continuation from Obama https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35806229 A US-led global coalition has also carried out air strikes and deployed special forces in Syria since 2014 to help an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias
Iran, was a buildup of troops in Saudi Arabia, says so in your own linked article…
Yemen, was also a continuation from Obama
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…
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 I wouldn’t have this preventative light bulb up my ass right now and I don’t know how I feel about that.
