To begin this post, Trump lost the 2016 American presidential election’s popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, but he ‘won’ the electoral college ‘tally’ by a significant number. However, that ‘Win’ resulted from a total margin of 77,000 votes spread strategically (through voter district gerrymandering) over three critical states - an accomplishment critically aided by a murky package of onion-layered data-mining and internet analysis-planting operations, shell companies and ultimately funded by Russian Intelligence. All of this added up to manipulation of the American 2016 election thru the ‘cooperation’ of Trump campaign managers, Wikileaks and an ‘independent’ Ukraine-based (not Ukrainian!), cyber-snooping startup that did ‘business with both the Republican and then the Democrat Party and alongside with Russian Intelligence (GRU) - a fine mix as they would say in Boston.
Once in office, Trump has openly, and without restraint from a partisan and blatantly enabling Senate, broached historically normative as well as some Constitutional presidential boundaries.
Trump has proven ignorant of, or ignores knowledge of American diplomatic practices, treaties and objectives; he has set his own personal, often erratic and short-term changeable, new ‘courses’ for American diplomacy that seems to change daily somewhere and appears to the international community to be a kind of drunken random walk. This has negatively impacted America’s trade and financial links.
Trump operates America like a small, sole-owner corner shop; or he wants to operate America that way. He is a micromanager and to render America suitable to his small-scope managerial capabilities, he has unmethodically (but effectively) reduced America to a giant dressed in rags, now humbled and bent to his small store vision limits. Trump has stripped most of the major government departments of seasoned top staff, reduced significantly operational employees, and inserted his personal directors who like him are unfamiliar with the operations and purposes of their new jobs. As the result, America presents to the world a face of ignorance, amateurish bumbling and unprofessionalism that constantly throws historical allies off-balance and estranged America’s relationships with them. A telling sign of the Trump era are his apparently favorite international leaders, a consistent set of global autocrat dictators - principally those of North Korea, Philippines, Brazil and Russia. America, directed by Trump, is no longer a ‘peer’ within the diplomatic and trade circles of former allies…why…because America no longer knows what it is doing!
On other fronts, Trump has shown a propensity to associate with fringe elements from conspiracy-theory groups to pseudo-science to neo -Nazi racists. Nazi-flage wavers are tolerated in public now and have open-door access to Trump.
Amid this and more, Trump has attempted to micro-manage America’s response to the COVID-19 virus pandemic - he has fronted new ‘cures’ as often as he hears of them even though some have been bizarre such as calling for testing bleach injections and throat sprays. Continuing with his attitude regarding the pandemic, Trump also displays a hostility to Science methodology and safety testing. Also in this regard, he has nearly destroyed the environmental regulations set up by former republican administrations to assure Americans of safe water, air and products.
To summarize, but there is much more that can be described, the Trump presidency has been characterized by ignorance, unprofessionalism, anti-science, anti-regulatory, anti-intellectualism, anti-government, small-scope destructiveness and pettiness. Plus all of these characteristics are mixed in with what some see as psychopathy, malignant-narcissism and a projected self-destructive bent.
The question is, at this time, how further down this destructive path and to what darker corners will Trump drag America and the rest of the world?
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