US Politics

This discussion is maybe more suited to a lecture hall, or at least a pub, but I’ll try putting my core thoughts across.

the man has damaged the US more than any single individual

Putting this all on Trump is mistake. This has been the Republicam playbook for then past 20 years, with Trump a useful foil.

Depends on what you mean by ‘all this’. The gop leadership of the last 70 years bears responsibility for so much of what is wrong with the US today, but I think trump still possibly has had and will have worse impact than any single other actor. He’s a grown man with agency, so even if he’s enacting others’ grand plans he’s still responsible for his actions. Please see further details on those thoughts, below.

@hugo7

It depends on what you mean by damage, but I think Regan carried out more structural and long term damage.

Reagan is a contender, sure, as is Nixon, but we’re seeing Reagan with 40 years of hindsight. We also happen to have access to most of what Reagan authorised while trump and his collaborators have purposely covered up their tracks at every turn. trump’s impact, from the birther scheme until today, has seen few saving graces. His real impact won’t be known for a decade, but I’d bet dollars to donuts what we find out is only going to get worse.

Also when you look at the loss of life in Vietnam and extra judicial killings through the 60s and 70s, on a body count he scores pretty well compared to quite a few others.

Body count, as you put it, is a difficult point to make and to counter on a forum discussion but I’ll have a go.

9 years’ of Vietnam war deaths are estimated to be 1.2 million people, on the high side. trump’s actions and immediate policies only on COVID have resulted in at least 1/3 of those number of deaths in the US in a single year. It’s unknowable what would have happened if trump hadn’t dismantled the White House team keeping watch for epidemic risks; or if he had taken covid seriously and led the charge internationally to contain and cure it. What is knowable is that he chose the path of contemptuousness and self-serving ego every time, others be damned, and a year later... well here we are. Let’s wait until they eventually add in preventable deaths from unavailable health care, deaths in ICE/police custody, deaths from drug OD, deaths in Yemen, etc. These aren’t issues he could have resolved with the stroke of a pen, but what did he do at all to resolve them? Most of these problems he’s actively encouraged and enabled, as well as doing what he could in dismantling the systems of checks and balances.

You mentioned extra judicial killings but you know they haven’t stopped (BLM). Chicago PD, for example, are alleged to still operate multiple secret detention centres, where people of a certain skin colour are dehumanised in all sorts of ways and spend months without any due process.

Honestly, I think this is where his crassness and overt cuntishness clouds peoples views. If you put stoking already present divisions to one side, what are his top 5 onerous and irreversible policies?

His impact isn’t measured solely in his policies. I’ve spent some time writing this response so not going to go into writing an essay on his 5 worst policies or his 5 worst impacts, but I’ll throw 5 bad ones out there: COVID (more US deaths than WW2), racial division (how do you think 46 mill. Black Americans feel nowadays?), dismantling an honest attempt at public healthcare (people died because of $450/month for insulin), dismantling checks and balances for corporations (tax evasion, environmental policies, billions to his friends and millions to himself, etc etc), destroying what remained of US reputation abroad after 9/11. Add a bonus, unnecessarily sadistic one: taking immigrant children, deporting their parents, and putting the kids up for adoption in the US with no clear paper trails.

It could be argued that Reagan tried to do something good for the US (I’m not a fan though). What good did trump do? If bringing the military home comes to mind, consider that he probably did that for their support for his putsch (the letter from 10 former SecDef points to that conclusion). (And their votes)

The way he’s debilitated people’s trust in the US system of governance, in the US and abroad, is the worst wound he’s caused to the US as an entity. The courts, the checks and balances, the righteousness of the Law... it all only matters if the system works, and the system only works if the people trust and believe in it, because it’s a fiction that only becomes real if we trust it is real. That trust is now broken. If the US is to survive they need to repair it.