Since I began writing these presidential series, I was waiting to write about this president like a kid waiting to eat his dessert. Now, I almost dread writing these words that will satisfy neither supporter or detractor and may make anyone mad if this was ever well-distributed. In some ways, this is the easiest president to grade given that many of his flaws have been so visibly shown for over four years. Yet, I can’t write his flaws with the same level of rancor as I did with Bush or the disappointment I gave with Obama as in some ways I appreciate his presidency the same way I appreciate the concept of destructive creation: to create, one must first destroy. Regrettably, President Trump never filled in the ideological void that he created though one hopes a new consensus can grow after him.
When this man became elected, the entire opposition questioned it for years- and to some extent are still questioning - spending years and countless barrels of ink speaking about how racism, Russia, and voter repression. Yet, the truth of the matter is that for all the talk about President Trump, we really never understood why he was elected and why did he ever gain such a large and loyal following that, until very recently, stuck with him to the end. I mentioned this to a friend on election night is that Trump was not the hope and change that came from President Obama but is rather the Hail-Mary pass that can keep the country from being unrecognizable for roughly half of the country. In that end, he failed as the populist movement that won over millions of Americans, including minorities for his re-election, remains still-born and unable to be implemented in the next four years. However, while President Trump is likely politically done in a matter of days, the jury is still out if another Trumpian candidate will take back the White House and begin what Trump started. If that ever comes to pass, its even more imperative to honestly assess Trump for where he went wrong and how did fail his movement.
His Three Fatal Flaws
It’s no secret that he never came close to delivering the promise of “Make America Great Again” but we need to understand why he failed and couldn’t be the harbinger of a new consensus that we desperately need. With this, I want to focus on why he failed and what were his personal defects that prevented him from truly becoming a president. Whereas I did this with President Obama focusing on his administration’s overall failures, albeit with some focus on his personal failures, I am now focusing on President Trump’s personal failures that had an overwhelming negative impact in his administration.
The first fatal flaw of President Trump is that he was absolutely lazy. In his first debate with Hillary Clinton, he defended his “stamina” against a woman who he perceived as not having the energy required for the office. Problem is, he also didn’t have the energy required to even meet the bare minimum performance in office. Throughout his administration, we saw a man who had little to no interest in understanding or learning about the duties and responsibilities of the office he was elected to focusing instead on its privileges and perks. While a president should never get to the point of micromanaging or be taken captive in the Oval Office’s demands, it’s important for a president to take long days and nights sweating strategy and policy with his advisers and senior officials from the federal budget to the incoming NATO summit. Instead, we had a president, in the middle of a pandemic, curtail daily briefings even though it gave him “high ratings.” Or what about the “executive time” that take a majority of his day where he is essentially doing nothing productive? And there are the numerous trips to his golf courses (298 as of this writing) and Mar-a-Lago where he is spending time on the course instead of sweating policy points with his officials. When you see all of this time where he isn’t doing work, you realize how little of he’s done in terms of legislation or policymaking leaving his greatest promises unfulfilled and his mere accomplishments his greatest feats. Sadly, this laziness should have been expected from a man who pretended to be a great businessman and then elected to pretend to be a great president.
His second fatal flaw is his endless narcissism. This is a bad flaw for all men, but it is an especially dangerous one to have for a leader. Being prone to narcissism leaves you to make decisions not for the greater good, but with the highest personal payoff (at least in your mind). We see a consequence for that narcissism when Trump selected his cabinet considering mainly sycophancy instead of competence. Needing loyal people within departments is important to further your administrative goals (albeit to an extent) but the type of loyalty that Trump expects- as exemplified by former lawyer Michael Cohen as sycophantic and deferential - is both poor management and invites the most wretched of humanity to advance their careers. Is it honestly a surprise that the Republican careerists - from Nikki Haley to Steve Mnuchin - were placed in senior positions when they provided unwavering flattery or overt loyalty to the president while honest and more competent advisors were left on the side of the road? Such sycophancy was rewarded as each cabinet official furthered their goals that sought to enrich themselves or at the very least enjoy the perks of higher office leaving such populist goals unfulfilled. Narcissists tend to surround themselves only with the people that are willing to put up with their idiocy and it is only when they undeniably lose that they learn they never had any clothes to begin with.
Finally, his main fatal flaw which is in part fueled by his other two flaws is that he’s has no discipline. The key to being a competent leader and a central theme in great presidents is exhibiting self-control, thinking on the long run while also considering the short term, and in turning defeats into victories. That’s not to say that presidents never lose it though they tend to at least do it privately and on rare occasions. President Trump has never enacted discipline beyond demanding for complete loyalty. There have been numerous occasions where Trump loses his cool in meetings or goes off on Twitter for perceived slights or actual criticism. Such petulance is not just beneath the president in terms of stature but it also weakens his position if others see him as nothing more than a man-child, a big ego with a thin skin to placate. There shouldn’t be any wonder that despite historic meetings with Kim Jong-Un in Singapore, the DMZ and Vietnam we are no closer to resolving the situation than before. What is worse is that because of his narcissism, no one has been able to temper his Twitter or channel his anger into more productive areas. Instead, we have a president who is content stoking the fires for his loyal base of supporters to make up for his lack of achievements. Thankfully this fire stoking came to bite him after the Capitol siege dimming whatever political future he might have had not because of “the Resistance” but because he never knew when to shut up.
The result of these flaws should be unsaid: an administration with abysmal turnover, a swamp that just became even more so with his family and cabinet, and a country dealing with a crisis that could have been prevented. One can wonder if his opponent would have truly done better though it will be hard to argue she would have done any worse. While I’ve criticized the presidents of my lifetime for being unambitious, reckless, and cosmopolitan, none of these presidents ever came close to exhibiting these three deadly sins that would cripple an ordinary administration and decimate in a crisis. If he didn’t have these three vices under control, he might have been a good president and lived up to the challenges; yet he decided to let those vices run rampant for four years eventually leaving him without four more.
His Sole Virtue- And my Biggest Disappointment
Frankly, I never liked President Trump nor was ever a strong supporter though there were instances and issues that I did sympathized with him. As I said before in my endorsement of Biden, I never saw President Trump as an authoritarian in waiting, but a personification of a mafia president at worst or even a President Dwayne Camacho at best. Yet, I identify with his voters in some ways and in the grievances they share from losing the pathway to the middle class to the cultural fear that their country is becoming unrecognizable. Perhaps that is why I always empathized and sometimes sympathized with Trump voters for both elections as I can understand why they voted for Trump- or sometimes the first Republican in their adulthoods. They all voted not just for a lottery ticket, but as a way to get back at a political system that left them decades ago and only returns every four years to drum up votes. It was in his victory, and even in his 2020 defeat, where he provided his greatest virtue of his presidency: sticking it to the establishment.
To understand this point, we have to look at the past 30-40 years of this country and how it has been hollowed out to its rotten core. For too long, society has disintegrated into individuals who are lonely, increasingly sick, and unequally rich. We’ve abandoned God for gold, melting it down into bulls that celebrate our fealty to Mammon. We lamented that we do not spend enough money or time abroad yet we turn away when we needed to spend just a little more for our own communities. All of this was abetted and encouraged by two political parties whose ideology in some ways became indistinguishable between either side. While there was some distinction in terms of social values when it came time for election season, the truth was that both parties advocated for some form of Wilsonian foreign policy, an embrace of free market economics that Thomas Friedman stated as the “golden straightjacket” in the Lexus and the Olive Tree and an acceptance of some form of liberalism. Both parties and the elites that guided our country during this time have become to incompetent or too vested in the status quo to provide meaningful solutions that are beyond what Krauthammer mentioned was the “40-yard line.” We had no direction as a country and we didn’t have any promise of improvement.
Then came Donald Trump and shook both parties to the core in 2016 promising to truly shake the establishment and to “drain the swamp.” While his business acumen was called into question, he bedazzled tens of millions with his superb salesmanship to give him a try to turn the ship of state around because in his words, “what the hell do you have to lose?” He offered a populist alternative that was culturally conservative but also promised an end to costly interventions abroad and for a better quality of life to those left behind. He provided a return to conservatism, albeit in a cruder form than what I might appreciate, that would actually move the goal posts and create a new consensus that meets the times. When he won, I was initially stunned but I was also optimistic hoping that we can forge a new establishment that can reverse the sins of the old. Sadly, because of the great sins that I mentioned above, his moment to provide a new consensus failed leaving many conservatives declaring that Trumpism as an ideology and a movement never truly existed. Without a real vision or strategy, the promise of a new consensus proved to be just a temporary pause as the establishment learned to co-opt him leaving the true nationalists out of the door. Worse, he also empowered the establishment to unite in taking down his administration, letting his incineration of the establishment become a temporary one as President Biden returns the old establishment more firmly than before. Because of his failures in office, he allowed his 2016 shake to be nothing more than a fluke and possibly ignored for at least four more years. While I welcome the rise of prominent men and women to at least question the old consensus and desire to forge a new one even after defeat, the truth is that national conservatism and traditional progressivism took a beating these past four years when it should have been our rise. One can hope such movements can be sustained in the wilderness though that is a question that should never have needed to be asked.
Final Verdict
A few days ago, I compared President Obama to Woodrow Wilson mainly as a way to compare both men’s flaws. Looking back, the comparison is more fitting as both men were succeeded by lesser presidents that make their administrations look better. President Trump will be remembered in time as a man who upended the establishment in 2016 only to fail in delivering the Hail-Mary pass his followers desperately wanted. In some ways, Donald Trump never moved past the 1980s where the get-rich-quick schemes, gold obsessions, and the telemarketer was king. As he pretended to be a successful businessman in the Apprentice, so did he try to pretend to be a successful president leaving policy to his cronies while he basked in the perks of office. It is even more tragic that despite the fact he has accomplished nothing that so many of his followers are willing to go down with him.
That said, I’m still not convinced he is the worst president that’s ever held office. While he certainly has many issues and I would place him in the top five worst presidents, I still believe that James Buchanan or Johnson was the worst president given that both have failed to have a single positive accomplishment beyond setting the country into an irreversible course toward civil war or bungling up Reconstruction and deferring civil rights for nearly a century. President Trump, for all his failures, can take credit for a couple of accomplishments from renegotiating NAFTA, recognizing China as an actual threat and highlighting the hypocrisy of the DC establishment. These successes do not make a good president, or even a mediocre one, but it is just enough from him being the worst.
Yet there is one question that has left to be answered: What Now? We are now entering a period resembling the 1970s with political violence, economic stagnation and a decline in trust for nearly all political institutions. President Trump correctly stated that the status quo is not enough anymore but he was too incompetent to replace it with another status quo. Based on the news of Joe Biden’s transition, it appears that the old establishment is returning, or at least just for this administration. Yet do people truly want to go back to the way things were, especially when they understand that the way things were set us into where we are now? Are Americans will be merely satisfied by average or will they start demanding more from their politicians?
The truth is I don’t know and I doubt anyone really knows. While I have many thoughts on the incoming Biden administration, I don’t know if Biden is just a temporary setback for the new order or a permanent restoration of a system. I hope that Republicans will at least understand that the old Reagan formula is not going to cut it anymore, but nothing so far has given me reason to hope. What will need to happen instead is that the movement must continue to form and grow even in opposition. There is reason to be optimistic in this regard. Historically, the Reagan right was able to grow even after being defeated in 1964 with Barry Goldwater and in 1976, only to convincingly win in 1980 and reframe American politics to this day. And even in defeat, we still have numerous conservatives who are sick of the status quo wanting to reclaim the mantle of conservatism and one day the government. If we are disciplined, shrewd, and a little bit lucky, conservatism can rise from Trump’s ashes and lead this country into a new golden age.
Final Grade: D-. I’m admittedly being generous given that he usurped the establishment though his grade can worsen if the return of the swamp is more permanent.