He will go down in history as the very worst U.S. president.
Donald Trump’s four years in office were marked by cruelty and criminality, insensitivity to the human condition, a purposeful lack of insight. The four years are a blight on U.S. history, devoid of any investment or interest in culture, the arts, sciences, from a man with no intellectual curiosity.
While I’m sure Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will act swiftly to erase and obliterate the Trump legacy, there were real victims. My own father died from COVID. So did many friends and acquaintances. This will be hard to recover from.
After three years of merely being evil, Trump devoted his fourth year to indulging his own stupidity and shortsightedness. He is responsible for the 400,000 deaths, the millions of people who got sick not to mention the separated border families and the unknown toll it took on them. Trump never looked at emigres as humans, just pawns in his sick game.
And that doesn’t include the polar bears, the wolves, the water. Whatever he touched turned to destruction. Everyone associated with him has either had their reputation destroyed, or they’re dead, or both. It’s no different than how we first encountered him, when he went behind the backs of the Landmark Commission and destroyed the historic doors to Bonwit Teller on Fifth Avenue to build his monstrous, ugly Trump Tower.
It was then that New Yorkers knew quite thoroughly how crass and vulgar Donald Trump was. We learned the hard way as he ripped up the far west side of Manhattan and walled it in with ugly glass boxes, lied about his finances, ruined lives in Atlantic City, had petty public fights with people like Merv Griffin and Rosie O’Donnell.
He was disgusting, coarse and low. When he carried on about Barack Obama’s birth certificate we stuck fingers in our ears. Certainly no one would listen to him. But we didn’t understand what he did: he could appeal to the lowest, most racist people within his reach, instill them with fear and hate. We laughed when it was suggested he could beat Hillary Clinton, why, she was brilliant and all the things Trump wasn’t. We tried to tell you.
‘Good people on both sides’ in Charlottesville and Mexicans as ‘rapists and drug dealers’ was just the beginning. Trump fomented hate. And kept ginning it up until January 6, 2021 when the whole construct fell in on him. There was just so much that America could take. A loser in his re-election bid, Trump wouldn’t give up. He doubled down on madness. The result was his distinction as the only president to be impeached twice. He leaves office in shame, possibly with legal ramifications. He and his horrible family leave our radar today at 12 noon. And we move forward without them.
