Assessment

Here's a picture of a barn next to a corn field taken late last fall in northwestern Illinois, where some farmer paid tribute to his country and his god.

 

Four years ago in the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump, I wrote one of my long essays prognosticating specific things I thought would happen during a Trump administration. Looking back at the results, I see it's a mixed bag. My prediction that Trump would get us into a large-scale global war didn't pan out despite Trump giving it a few good tries. I was right about Trump's wall (I said that other than a few small sections built for show, it mostly wouldn't happen), but I strongly underestimated the white nationalist motivation behind Trumpism and the effort they'd put into deportations. And I never imagined the concentration camps or the kids kept in cages.

 

I was unsure about whether Obamacare would be repealed, though I knew there'd be no replacement, and there wasn't. I said that either way, a lot of people would lose their health insurance. That number of people turned out to be somewhere around 10 million.

 

I correctly predicted Trump's trade wars, but overestimated the impact those trade wars -- and Trump in general -- would have on the economy. Mostly, the trends President Obama had set in motion after the recovery from the last Republican recession continued on despite Trump's best efforts, though Trump tried to take credit for establishing a trend he only inherited. The economy was really just fine right up until it hit the wall of Trump's failed response to the global pandemic.

 

I did not predict the global pandemic.

 

I predicted mass deregulation (which has happened) and large-scale sell-offs of government land (which tried to happen but wound up contained) and the elimination of at least a few protected areas. I thought Trump would bring about a thousand environmental catastrophes, and he has. I thought Trump and his Republican Congress would go after the Antiquities Act of 1906, but they only side-swiped it and otherwise mostly left it alone. I thought the nationwide push of state laws toward marijuana legalization would be reversed, but it was mostly unaffected.

 

I was most accurate with my predictions concerning the federal judiciary. Trump filled the three Supreme Court seats I said he'd fill and the hundreds of open Federal Court seats Mitch McConnell had worked so hard to leave empty for him. This leaves potential for probable attacks from the right on abortion and marriage equality that are just now beginning to build, and it will make any kind of progressive agenda that would please the leftists who voted against Clinton next to impossible. I said when we inaugurated Trump that we had lost the judiciary to the far right for at least the next two generations, and that's what's playing out.

 

So all in all, I'd give myself a 60%. I thought some things would be issues that weren't, and a lot of what were issues were things I didn't see coming. In the end, I think it's a question of precision versus accuracy. I wasn't very precise, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this would be the worst presidential administration of my lifetime. And I was 100% accurate in that. If anything, I undersold how bad it would be. James Buchanan fans should be happy. Trump will absolutely be remembered as the worst man ever to hold the office of President.

 

Just look at where we are now after four years of reality show leadership. We've made fools of ourselves on the world stage. We've sold out our allies and bowed down to our enemies and abandoned our standing as a leading world power. We helped an arrogant strongman transform Russia from a largely impotent failed state into one of the world's most significant threats. We faked toughness toward China that did nothing but give them increased control of the global marketplace. Similar fake toughness pushed Iran and North Korea to work even harder on the development of nuclear weapons. We cheered on threats to NATO, applauded the sundering of the European Union, and stood side by side with dictators and autocrats. We gave up any standing we might ever have had to promote democracy or human rights, because we stopped believing in even the veneer of those things at home.

 

At home, we became more cruel and more divisive as half the nation joined the MAGA cult. The endemic racism that has always lurked beneath the surface of this nation was given voice and tiki torches as Trump reassured all the racists that they were very good people. We eliminated anything we could find in the Federal infrastructure that might help people. We abandoned regulations that protected our air and our water and our landscape, though we still didn't get any jobs out of it; the coal mines and steel mills are still closed. We deepened our hatred of science and logic and reason and embraced insane conspiracy theories instead. We pretended that the most significant threat to human health to have appeared in a century was nothing more than a hoax, and we turned our reaction to it into a bunch of political stunts that resulted (at last count) in 400,000 American deaths. We pushed for the dismantling of the entire democratic process. We stormed the Capitol and tried to end the Republic.

 

Statements like "worse than the Civil War" always seemed so hyperbolic to me in the past. Then Trump came along and made it real. Now there are Q conspiracists in Congress, and states are talking about secession. And I'm at the point where I'd almost let them go.

 

But now it's all about to end. In less than a day -- only 20 hours and 51 minutes from the moment I uploaded this -- Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. will be inaugurated the 46th President of the United States, and a new era will begin. A lot of that new era will look like the old era -- the blue flag you see here will still fly over this northwestern Illinois farm -- but at least Trump won't be around to feed the beast and facilitate the failures. I'm not going to make any prediction about how President Biden will do, as Trump has left him with immense challenges to overcome, and he leads a party that has a hard time holding itself together and working as a unit. I already see grumblings from the Far Left that make me want to kick people. I can't say precisely what's going to happen, but I think I can accurately say that it will be nowhere near as bad as what we've just endured. Whether it will be "not bad" enough to pull us back from the edge and keep some more horrifying version of this from happening in 2024 ... well, I can't say.

 

And Donald Trump? Sometime tomorrow, he's going go to an Air Force base and force a military band to play him a song and shower him in all the glory he thinks he deserves, and then he'll board a plane to Florida. There, he'll find some gold-plated room where he'll hide as his trophy wide divorces him and his business associates abandon him and prosecutors from a dozen states and the Federal government come to hunt him down, and he'll wallow in the knowledge that despite all his rage, all his arrogant, delusional, self-pitying sense of entitlement, he lost. I hope he withers there. My guess is he'll be dead well before the next time I write an inaugural reflection.

 

Either way, he can fuck all the way off.

Done