I was looking for a way to address the 800 pound gorilla in the Republican room that is the former president, Donald J. Trump. I feel that the old Clint Eastwood title was the best way to organize my thoughts regarding the most controversial president we’ve had since Nixon. Here goes…
But first…
Full disclosure upfront: I voted for him both in 2016 and 2020, but with qualifiers.
I was never a Trump guy; I voted for Cruz in the primary. I could not stand his debate performances in 2015. They were appalling. His smears against women in those debates were grating. His smear of Megyn Kelly for asking a perfectly valid question, and one that did rear its very ugly misogynistic head in the general campaign, about Trump’s well-established history of denigrating women was just wrong. Furthermore, he got his supporters to hate her too, which made his appalling smear worse. But I was able to attend a Trump rally that was just a half-mile from my house in December 2015 and that gave me an insight into his relationship with the media. He insulted them, as he often does, and the media in attendance just shook their heads and smiled, like they were in on the joke.
The Good
When he was nominated in early 2016, I was on board for Trump to win, mostly because Hillary Clinton is such an awful person. I wasn’t certain she would be nominated given the highly illegal email server in her bathroom, but then Comey happened and that was that. I supported Trump for one reason and one reason only: I knew I had a shot at Conservative policies with Trump; I had no chance and no hope for anything Conservative with a Hillary Administration. And some good, Conservative policies we did get from Trump. I was deployed in support of the fight against ISIS in January 2017 as my last deployment prior to retirement from the Army. I saw firsthand how Trump enabled his in-theater commanders to make the key decisions needed to liberate Syria and Iraq from the very evil ISIS fighters. That was very welcome and encouraging sign for a nascent presidency. During Trump’s presidency, we saw tax cuts, we saw hundreds of Conservative judges and THREE Conservative Supreme Court Justices get through the Senate. The economy was roaring through 2019. All of the stats that Trump repeated throughout his re-election campaign regarding employment of men and women of all racial and demographic groups were 100% true and valid. That was the good of Trump.
The Bad
But for every accomplishment Trump had, he undercut his own successes with all of his personality baggage he brought to every public appearance. Yes, “but he fights” is a true statement of Trump, however, he fights EVERYONE. He never embraced the immense honor it is to hold the same office as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan. He punches down on anyone that criticizes him, Republican and Democrat alike. He was always campaigning, never embraced the role as President in his demeanor, and did not moderate any of his campaign excesses. His tweet-storms were very annoying. He undercut his own team members in his administration, who were out there talking to the media trying to smooth over the rough edges of a Trump tweet, with yet another bombastic tweet. His administration was an exercise in futile chaos. Many very talented people passed through the doors of the White House during his administration, but so many more terrible people also worked in his administration. He batted about .250, using the baseball stat, on his personnel hires. By the end of his administration, many cabinet positions were occupied by those “acting” as Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Homeland Security, and many many other key cabinet level posts. Self-defeating inefficiency and internal conflict hurt the great potential Trump had in 2017 and cost the GOP the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020. But that is not even the worst aspect of Trump and his time in office. And this is all on top of the mishmash, stream of conscious speaking style of Trump that led often to accusations of racism, white extremist sympathies, and the like. His ‘off the cuff’ speaking gave his Democrat opponents, who were mentally fat and lazy with the “Trump-Russia Collusion” canard, easy means to criticize and oppose Trump at every turn.
The (very) Ugly
At the start of 2020, we were facing the start of what would be the COVID-19 global pandemic. It started off small, with five elderly people in Seattle getting back home from a cruise that had a stop in China. Once the pandemic took hold, all of the bad things that had soured the relationship between the White House and Congress came to the fore. Trump’s terrible personnel instincts led him to sign off on “14 days to slow the spread” which then morphed into national lockdowns and school closings that devastated our economy and severely damaged the learning of our children. We are bludgeoned every day with Trump speaking ad nauseum from the podium of what was supposed to be the Vice-President’s COVID Response Task Force. He wouldn’t shut up and let Pence have even a moment in the spotlight. With his ill-informed narcissism on full display, Trump would tout Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, even though it was a proposed treatment without any testing on efficacy. He would wax rhapsodic in a moment of whimsy about injecting a blood cleaner into peoples’ veins, which the very left-wing media ran with to say that Trump wants people to inject bleach into their veins. Obviously not what he meant, but none of that matters once its out on TV or in newspapers. All of the COVID response chaos was underlying the Trump reelection campaign. Every action by the Trump COVID response was viewed through the lens of the reelection campaign. Trump was impeached because, in a moment of pure undisciplined hubris, he spoke to the Ukrainian President about investigating one of his potential opponents in November. The ugliness got worse later in 2020 as Trump would end up campaigning… AND LOSING… to a clearly deficient Joe Biden. It is in the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day where Trump’s toxic personality truly was exposed for all to see. To this day, Trump has never found one ounce of Grace to accept that when the Electoral College voted, he lost. No one told him to like their decision or to be happy about he result of the vote, but his ravings of elections being “stolen” to his followers built to a crescendo on January 6th, 2021. While I live just an hour from Washington DC, there is no way I would have ever considered going to the “Stop the Steal” rally. I told my friends that this was a fool’s errand, and it would never produce the end result they wanted. Trump lost the election three weeks earlier on December 14th. The question has always been out there: did Donald Trump plan for an insurrectionist assault on Capitol Hill? I do not believe that Trump wanted mobs of people to actually storm the Capitol Building and seize back the presidency for him. I just don’t believe Trump thinks that far ahead. What he wanted to do was intimidate Congress, especially sympathetic Republicans in the chamber, to not declare Biden the winner. What Trump did on January 6th was the most irresponsible and dangerous actions to the peaceful transfer of power I have ever seen. His “march peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol” comment is but a wink and a nod of where he wanted them to go and what he wanted the mob to do. It is disgraceful for a president to stand at a podium and speak against the peaceful transfer of power. Those comments alone, that he actually went out there and spoke himself that day, are all the evidence I need to see that Donald J. Trump is unfit to serve as president now or at any time in the future. This is the ugliest of Trump’s ugly actions of his presidency. He 100% deserved a second impeachment for his actions and I understand that it is unprecedented to “remove” a president that has already left office for actions that occurred during the waning days of his presidency. However, that appears to be one loophole that political thinkers should consider how to close.
For all the Good that was accomplished during the Trump presidency, it is the Bad and the very Ugly actions of Donald Trump that motivates me, in part, to wish to run for the presidency in 2024. There is so many more qualified, accomplished, intelligent, and graceful people in the Republican Party to stand on the debate stage against a petulant, spite filled, and completely rearward focused Trump. I do not know how many of those good men and women will take up the challenge of keeping Trump and his Cult of Personality from winning the nomination and also to defeat Joe Biden, or whichever Democrat is the nominee, in 2024. It is this two-pronged threat: Trump gets the nomination because no one stands against him, that motivates me to put this website together and put these thoughts here.
If you stuck with me to the end, I thank you for the time.
