The answer is, not much, not much at all that benefits the American people, serves our economic and social needs, strengthens our rule of law, advances our civilization, or makes our egalitarian ethos stronger.
His is an overwhelmingly negative presidency. He’s done nothing that I can see to make our lives better, safer, healthier, or more optimistic. He and the party he leads have been a wrecking ball, all but destroying the dignity of holding public office, undermining the livelihoods of those who’ve committed their lives to public service, and abandoning the role government plays in advancing the social and economic progress of American culture.
As Bill Scher wrote in the Washington Monthly earlier this year, “except for the damage, nothing Trump is doing will last.”
His presidency will leave nothing behind that does us any good, no new programs to advance the equality and opportunity of underprivileged Americans, no new federal work programs to make it easier for Americans to make a living, no new policies at all to advance the collective prosperity of the American people. He will be seen in the future as the leader of a party that spent eight years making life harder and meaner by proudly working to accomplish absolutely NADA.
And what of the damage? Trump’s party leaves in its wake conditions that could prove to be catastrophic for the future of our families. Trump and his predecessors weaponized the Republican party as political drones put to the service of those industries that have made it a near religious calling out of denying climate change and raping public lands. Trump’s major efforts have been to deregulate industries that have covered up their pollution with deceitful propaganda for decades and decades, making it easier to despoil the fertility of the natural world we all depend on.
Trump’s presidency, combined with the Bush-Cheney years, has allowed America’s contribution to the turbulent negativity of climate change to accelerate almost beyond containment. Older Americans like me won’t see anything close to the worst of it, but my kids, grandkids and their children well could.
Nothing much is going to change for the better for the next two years, even if Democrats get landslide victories in the House and Senate this year. Is there anything to be done? We can keep energizing and fine tuning our opposition. The intensity that such focus requires depends on all of us finding a way out of the sticky trap of preposterous pronouncements Trump spends most of his time spinning and weaving.
Political scientists and philosophers like New Mexico’s Richard Fox are dead right when they assert that now is the time to start thinking beyond Trump and how to heal the wounds he’s inflicted on our confidence in the 250-year experiment of constitutional democracy as the core of the American way of life. Trump will always be Trump, a do-nothing lame duck who is lamer than he’s ever been, a paltry would-be authoritarian who’d like to turn us into a police state, but who seems so far unable to own the police no matter how hard he tries, ICE notwithstanding.
If it was just Trump, that would be daunting enough. But there’s also the U.S. Supreme Court to contend with. On the scale of government perfidies, the Court’s conservative majority in many ways out trumps Trump. From invalidating a Hawaiian ban on bringing firearms on private property — like stores, gas stations, and hotels — unless the owner approved it, to making it easier to keep asylum seekers out of the country even if their lives are in danger, to weakening voter rights protections against gerrymandering and increasing executive authority over the political expression of federal workers, the Court has made it easier for a conservative president to behave like an autocrat, even if he’s inept at it.
The greatest danger to our way of life spawned over the last two years is not ideological, constitutional or administrative, it is primal. What is more basic to the good life, or any life, than a stable, friendly climate? What can government do better to promote personal wellbeing and provide solace, comfort, inspiration, and repose than to rigorously protect federal parks and monuments from exploitation?
The impact of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency rejecting the fundamental premise that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health is staggering. The EPA will no longer regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industry, nor emissions from vehicles. The agency will no longer be in the forefront of America’s effort to stem global climate change. In fact, there will be no anti-climate-change initiatives in our country at all for the rest of the Trump presidency. He’s gone so far as to claim that global warming is “hoax” and a “con job” perpetrated by politically motivated lefty scientists. There’s no way to say how much damage to the wellbeing of the world’s people this pernicious point of view will cause, but it can’t be good.
No good can come either from Trump’s opening up of public lands to what amounts to unrestrained mining, logging, drilling and fracking. Already, that policy is starting to rob the public of the natural tranquility of Chaco Canyon National Monument by removing the protection of a ten mile no-extraction buffer zone. The Bureau of Land Management has announced it’s already opened millions of acres of federal land to coal leasing, wrecking many landscapes and contributing to global warming. And recently two of the nation’s newest National Monuments — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah — have been shrunk by a Trump executive order to make way for more extractions and their polluting emissions.
Although most of Trump’s executive orders can be erased in a flash when his term has expired, the president himself is too old to suffer from the lethal turbulence that a heated climate with its massive storms and rising seas that his morally irresponsible climate change denial will help to create.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
What Trump is leaving us is a country much closer to accepting neofascism than it was before his presidencies. Not something material that we can touch but something much more dangerous.
I am old. Most people are dead around my age. But now, after reading your essay, I have heightened motivation to take better care of myself. I will NOT die while that fool is in the Oval Office. Plan to eat better and exercise more.
Thank you.
Nailed it.