So, I’m having a friendly debate with somebody about this “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” post by Mr. Trump…
My friend, a retired police officer, is a great guy, salt of the earth, etc. He thinks it’s an understandable representation of Trump’s frustration. And maybe it is. But the question remains, did Trump’s attorneys have the chance to see that post before he pushed “send”? Did anybody above the age of 14? Does anybody honestly think had his attorneys seen it, they’d have said, “Yes, Mr. President, we think that’s a really swell post; put that jazz up ASAP”? Does Donald Trump have a moral obligation to listen to his attorneys if they didn’t? Well, when you consider that his working-class supporters, through their small-dollar donations, are picking up his attorneys’ bills, I’d say he has some sense of obligation to try to help them win their case. I mean, good God, people.
What are we doing? The man isn’t somebody you would hire to do a really big and important job like running the largest hotel conglomerate in the world, based on his Truth Social posts alone. Well, we’re also not supposed to re-hire him to run the largest corporation in the history of the world, either. Not at this point. Not after what happened the last time.
I can anticipate the Trump swarm coming down on that statement and asking, what about what happened last time? He had the greatest economy in history, the cheapest gas ever, no world wars, et cetera, et cetera. Fine, but he also shut down the economy and took the repeated advice of two of the most destructive public health bureaucrats in the country, if not the world. Their advice led to some of the most profoundly destructive economic and social impacts the world has seen in decades, if not in a century.
I truly think we need to go back to Herbert Hoover signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, which caused the Great Depression, to find an equivalent level of presidential mistake.
President Trump agreed to shut down the U.S. economy because of a healthcare panic; the most important, dynamic, complex, and successful market economy on the planet, due to a bad virus, was Hooverian in its depths of disastrousness. And this, of course, also resulted in other developed economies following suit, some even more violent economically and socially than we did. I don’t think that is a hyperbolic statement. I think it is a fair and accurate statement.
Let’s be brutally clear. Hoover’s well-intended but wrongheaded policy caused the Great Depression, and we know how that all went. Equally true, Trump’s well-intended but wrongheaded policy caused untold pain, suffering, and misery, not to mention bankruptcies, foreclosures, suicides, and premature deaths. It also wiped out a crucial block of irreplaceable time for in-person instruction for tens of millions of American kids, the full ramifications of which we’ll not sustain for about a decade.
Trump has disqualified himself from ever being elected president again simply by virtue of that single, solitary decision while in office. And this I believe in the marrow of my bones.