There seems to be a LOT of people who either don’t agree withg thgat statement or forgot how fucked up things were for FOUR years….
Ah?
SO fucked up that Trump lost his first Government job….
Damn he was bad at the job.
I was one of the political scientists who participated in a “rank the presidents” surveyand it was easy to place Trump dead last, given everything.1 But the truth is that even if Trump had followed and accepted the law, including the Constitutional “emoluments” provision, and even if he didn’t provoke an insurrection in support of his bid to overturn an election he lost, and even if he didn’t have a history of sexual assault, and even if he didn’t regularly make bigoted remarks and encourage bigotry…he was still quite a bit worse at the regular parts of presidenting than any of the modern presidents, at least.2
It’s hard to know where to begin, and I’m obviously not going to convince anyone in a few short paragraphs or even a full item, but even given how important all that other stuff is his gross incompetency at the job is worth remembering. Trump had terrible personnel judgement. He was easily manipulated by everyone – bureaucrats, foreign leaders, members of Congress, pretty much anyone who figured him out, which apparently wasn’t difficult. He didn’t even attempt to talk to the half (or really a bit more than half) of the nation who hadn’t supported him.
But if you had to focus on just one thing, it’s that by all accounts he utterly failed at the thing that Richard Neustadt thought was the most important thing for presidents to do in order to succeed: Collecting information. Trump didn’t read. He didn’t pay attention during briefings. He didn’t care about policy. He didn’t even bother, as far as anyone can tell, to learn the basic rules of the constitutional system. He did apparently watch a lot of cable news networks, which is…let’s just say not a great way of learning much.3
Look: This part of it doesn’t have much to do with vote choice. Ronald Reagan was better at the job than Jimmy Carter, but I’d have advised mainstream liberal Democrats to vote for Carter in 1980; I suspect Walter Mondale would have been better at the job than Reagan, but conservative Republicans would have been nuts to vote for Mondale in 1984. There is a strong argument that conservative Republicans who have a strong commitment to democracy should abandon Trump, but it’s not based on how bad he is at the normal aspects of the job. It would have been one of many good reasons for Republicans to nominate someone else, though.
Bottom line is that Trump didn’t know much and doesn’t even know how to learn more, and you can’t be good at the job without knowing much. That, even more than his disregard for the rule of law, made him a very dangerous president for four years, and given that there’s no evidence he’s learned anything it would make him a very dangerous president again….