Donald Trump’s Pathetic First Four Years as United States President
Donald Trump is the first American president to ever meet face to face with a North Korean leader. Probably envisioning himself as Ronald Reagan commanding Mikhail Gorbachev to dismantle the Berlin Wall, this blind idiot was easily flattered by President Kim Jong Un’s deft diplomacy work, finding his attempt to get the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to abandon their nuclear weapons program completely derailed by high-sounding phrases from one of his country’s staunchest enemies.
Failure Seated in the Oval Office
Donald Trump was sworn into office as the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017, after defeating establishment Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. While Trump failed to win the popular vote, he found an Electoral College majority in his favor in the ratio of 304 supporting him, to 227 supporting Clinton. Considered by many in the mainstream conservative atmosphere before winning in the Republican primaries – owing much more to right-wing factionalism than anything related to his own viability as a candidate – to be a laughing matter of great magnitude, the mass of conservative voters rallied behind Trump and his bombastic rhetoric mainly to prevent a Clinton presidency, much to the delight of neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Ku Klux Klan, and other rabid dogs of the bourgeois establishment within this particular constituency.
One of the first things Donald Trump did as sitting president was issue an executive order restricting entry into the United States from majority Muslim countries. This was done under the pretense of protecting national security. Racial and religious profiling became preferred mechanisms for enforcing this peculiar action. He also issued a number of tariffs on Chinese-manufactured products which the United States economy had come to depend on for basic function. The tariffs were supposed to compensate for the tax cuts he gave to large corporate establishments in the country, but fell brutally short of doing so. The Trump administration also increased military spending as per the usual Republican Party line, attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and alienated the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with its strange policy concerning European Union defense budgets.
While the international community was, and still is, largely united in their open contempt for and ridicule of Donald Trump, the American public has found his personality and decision-making uniquely polarizing. Mainstream conservatives initially only reluctantly cast their support for Trump out of sheer loyalty to the Republican Party after each of its more conventional candidates failed to achieve widespread support to an extent significant enough to defeat Trump’s blatant showboating, and only now hold any pretense of enthusiastic support for this blustering oaf out of fear that the Democratic Party has been infiltrated by communist agitators. Liberals and conservatives still skeptical of this almost completely transparent puppet of the corporate elite voiced their dismay at his political success despite his numerous criminal allegations, including two impeachments, to much the same degree and fashion as they do today. This much, however, is interesting: while today, members of the radical, extremist, white supremacist right wing hold only lukewarm support for this prolific liar and charlatan, back in the year 2016, their reaction to Trump had been highly enthusiastic and decidedly celebratory.
The 2016 Election
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. To an immense fanfare of jeering and laughter from liberals and mainstream conservatives alike, Donald Trump endorsed a national-populist platform. He promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico, increase deportations of undocumented workers, and create jobs in the United States by waging a trade war against the People’s Republic of China. The lack of mainstream support was compensated for with inflammatory rhetoric and pompous sloganeering guaranteed to garner corporate news attention. While mainstream conservatives at the time championed free international trade and paternalistic foreign policy catering to military allies abroad, Donald Trump found political expediency in framing these long-standing conservative principles as an open betrayal of the American people. This apparently anti-establishment message was immensely appealing to a very different kind of right-wing conservative.
The term “alt-right” was popularized by the self-proclaimed and actual white nationalist Richard Spencer, president of the openly racist National Policy Institute, during this period. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the alt-right is a diverse consortium of antisemites, white nationalists, Islamophobes, and male supremacists. This motley assortment of knuckle-dragging corporate establishment goons considered Trump’s radical diversion from typical Republican Party line as a golden opportunity to garner mainstream exposure to their fringe politics. The anti-immigration, anti-establishment, pro-nationalist political platform gave the alt-right movement a fertile landscape from which to spread their particular worldview to mainstream conservative circles which welcomed their wingnut neo-fascist agendas with open arms.
For all the blustering and far-right fanaticism directing media attention to the Donald Trump campaign, the vast majority of political science experts predicted a Democratic Party victory. Hillary Rodham Clinton had a wealth of experience working in the federal government, managing federal government affairs and building federal government connections, while Donald Trump had nothing of the sort. But public distrust of the mainstream establishment would deal a shocking blow to conventional wisdom. Even though Donald Trump would lose the popular vote, this, in and of itself, doesn’t mean public opinion had nothing to do with his election. Donald Trump’s populist message appealed to certain constituencies in such historically liberal states as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He also won Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina with his loud sloganeering and rhetoric. Although the Electoral College is what ultimately decides the presidential election, the popular vote within states tends to inform the Electoral College decision as the members of the College, itself, are beholden to popular support. So it can’t be said that the Electoral College betrayed the American people by voting against a slight popular majority in favor of Clinton (Trump only received 46.09% of the popular vote, a difference of 2.9 million voters). The entire government is a betrayal of the American people. What can be said, however, is that a significant number of Electoral College voters found it politically expedient to support a populist, anti-establishment candidate. A widespread distrust of the social order was already apparent to the American governing body, and the opportunity to engineer a negation of this distrust was promptly taken.
Slavish Support for Capital
A piece of legislation from the Barack Obama administration preceding Trump’s presidency is the Affordable Care Act. This act provides some subsidized medical insurance to individuals who are unable to afford private healthcare insurance. Naturally, even though Donald Trump was famously popular with European-Americans with no college education, his early administration attempted to have the Affordable Care Act repealed. Because the 2016 election left both the Senate and the House of Representatives with a Republican majority, this brazen attempt to enrich private capital in the health insurance industry was seen as possible. But this motion was stopped on the Senate level by a few moderate Republicans, most famously the Arizona senator John McCain, who sided with the Democrats on opposing it.
One embarrassing myth that seems to populate Donald Trump’s flabby head like rats in an abandoned warehouse is the idea that imposing tariffs on imports from China will cause economic incentive to magically “bring” jobs closer to United States communities. However, like the tariffs he has imposed during his second term, these tariffs did not function as promised. This is because in order for new jobs to enter the job market, an investment of what Marx called “constant capital” is necessary to give workers a means with which to provide labor to the production process. New places of work have to be built and furnished with productive machinery, lease agreements have to be signed with landlords, zoning boards have to approve their construction, and final licensing has to be granted to the new places of business before the business ramp-up process can even begin for each commercial spot. What this means is it’s far more economical for large capital to simply raise prices to compensate for the cost imposed on them by tariffs. Only the working class is significantly impacted by the sudden inflation caused by this pompous buffoon’s protectionist economic policy.
Donald Trump is one out of only three United States presidents to ever get impeached by the House of Representatives, the other two being President Andrew Johnson in 1869, and President Bill Clinton in 1998. This was because in the year 2019, after the midterm elections that cost the Republican Party its majority in the House of Representatives, Donald Trump charged Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy with investigating matters involving then former Vice President in the Barack Obama administration, Joseph Biden, and his son, Hunter Biden, both of whom had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. At the same time, he withdrew military support from Ukraine for its conflict with Russia. This hypocritical anti-corruption action from the Donald Trump administration drove the House, under its majority leader Nancy Pelosi, to issue the formal impeachment inquiry on September 24, 2019, with the actual impeachment from the House issued on December 18, 2019, on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of congress. Because the Republican Party still held a majority in the Senate, Donald Trump was acquitted. He was impeached again on January 13, 2021, for “incitement of insurrection” following the infamous January 6, 2021 Capitol Building riot, one of the most striking political temper tantrums to ever hit the American landscape. Because the decision to penalize Donald Trump did not attain the two-thirds Senate majority required, Donald Trump was, again, acquitted.
Blustering and Broken Promises
A wall stretching across the United States border with Mexico in a way matched only by the Great Wall of China was furiously promoted by the Donald Trump presidential campaign as a grand final solution to the problem of illegal immigration from Latin America. This, however, turned out to be nothing more than a marketing gimmick. Even early in his presidential term, when the Republican Party held both a Senate and a House majority, Donald Trump was never able to get the congressional funding required to get the wall constructed. As a scandalous affair broadcasted by the corporate news media to capitalize on wingnut conservative outrage, it fizzled and died with incredible speed. The matter was quickly swept under the rug and forgotten as Donald Trump’s paid and unpaid sycophants scattered about the body politic to find new ways to promote the 45th president’s cult of personality.
One defining tendency of clinical narcissists is the tendency to undermine, or attempt to undermine, the achievements of everyone adjacent to them. An extreme case of this is glaringly obvious in the case of Donald Trump’s constant attacks on the legacy left behind by the Barack Obama administration. Alongside the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act is the United States withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in the year 2018. The Donald Trump administration had it in their empty heads that they could coerce Iran into a more restrictive diplomatic agreement limiting their nuclear program. The reality, however, was clearly opposite. No longer fettered by the nuclear agreement they accrued jointly with the Barack Obama administration, they ramped up their nuclear program, something to which Donald Trump could only respond with aggressive economic sanctions. The fact that Iran is an independent sovereign state with international recognition and friendly relations with major world powers, and not a fiefdom in tiny Trump’s magical kingdom of free trade and star-spangled glory, apparently did not register to the 45th president of the United States or his inexperienced executive staff.
Despite being a fair bit more modest in height than Trump, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea President Kim Jong Un has inspired a girlish sort of gushing awe from the smarmy pig in the Oval Office. On June 12, 2018, Tiny Trump became the very first American president to ever personally meet with North Korean leadership, an event which occurred in Singapore only a year after he had screamed from the White House rooftop that he would “rain fire and fury never before seen on this Earth” on the North Korean people, something the United States has not done to that country since the Korean War. These flamboyant threats were issued to the North Korean people to get them to dismantle their nuclear arsenal. Because Kim Jong Un personally flattered this infantile moron in both the June 12 Singapore summit, and a 2019 summit in Hanoi, Donald Trump and his spineless supporters have swept this issue under the proverbial rug, which at this point is starting to look more like a teepee than any sort of floor covering.
Trump the Clown
Due to the widespread disappointment Donald Trump caused over the course of his first term, he was defeated in the 2020 election by Democratic Party empty suit Joseph A. Biden. The narcissistic temper tantrum following drove him to accuse Biden of election fraud causing a great pile of missing Donald Trump votes. Despite a deep and highly involved investigation regarding the matter, no such election fraud was discovered. Finding the presidential campaign defeat abhorrent to the extreme, a small army of right-wing dogs staffed and orchestrated a quasi-violent political demonstration, often referred to as a riot, on the Washington D.C. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. As mentioned previously, this caused Donald Trump to be impeached for allegedly inciting the riot, a crime for which he was acquitted by the Senate in which the Republican Party enjoyed a substantial majority. President Biden went on to toe the establishment Democratic Party line as a one-term, 46th United States president.
The first Donald Trump administration laid much of the groundwork for all the mistakes that the second Donald Trump administration would go on to make. There would be no war with Iran if the United States hadn’t withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal made during the Barack Obama administration. No precedent for the sweeping tariffs so largely responsible for devaluing the United States dollar to unforeseen lows would have been established without Donald Trump’s economic protectionist policies that only ever appealed to hawkish American nationalists and the neo-Nazi, far-right fringe elements of society. Despite Donald Trump’s trigger-happy accusations against his opponents on Twitter, and in corporate media broadcasts which he has hypocritically denounced as “fake news” as a matter of standard practice, his approval ratings are perpetually abysmal, and even his zealous Holocaust-denying, bible-thumping online spam promoters have lost faith in him. Having alienated every one of his support bases outside the wealthy ruling class from his personality cult, Donald Trump stands proudly as one of American history’s most famous con artists, a legacy which he is furnishing now in his second term with even more fiery rigor than he did during his first.
