Trump Was The Worst President— A Second Term Would Be Far, Far Worse Than The First

The Ultimate Lesser Of Two Evils Election For Many Americans

"The Squeeze" by Nancy Ohanian

The new YouGov poll shows that, for the first time, a majority of Americans (52%) finally understand that Trump falsified records to hide the hush money payment. Only 22% still don’t get this. Half the respondents (50%) think “Trump wanted the National Enquirer to buy and bury negative stories about him was to protect his 2016 presidential campaign,” while just 18% say they don’t believe that. Furthermore 54% of those polled think the judge should toss Trump’s ass in jail if he violates the gag order again (31% disagree) and by 51% to 36% Americans think he should go to prison if he’s found guilty in the hush money case.

That’s nice. But can Biden win in November? Harold Meyerson had some bad news on Tuesday: even though swing voters prefer Democrats generically (including the party’s messaging), that doesn’t include Joe Biden. Much of what Meyerson had to say can be taken with a grain of salt since it was based on the always flawed/never accurate Siena poll released by the NY Times this week. (Siena knows how to poll New York State… and that’s it.) 

Some of the trends though, should be worrying for teh Biden campaign. “It’s among those groups of Americans who’ve long been part of the Democratic base— Blacks, Latinos, and the young— that Biden has hemorrhaged support. These groups make up a disproportionate share of the financially strapped, which highlights the need for Biden to highlight much more than he has his initiatives to bring down the costs of medicines and the junk fees that corporations inflict on consumers.” Part of the problem is that Biden is a bad messenger for good messages. People don’t like his affect and tune him out quickly. He’s old and seems frail and out of touch A Financial Times columnist, Janan Ganesh “noted a striking contextual similarity between Biden and Lyndon Johnson. Both their presidencies followed those of far more charismatic and articulate leaders of their own parties: Johnson’s after JFK’s, Biden’s after Barack Obama’s. Both Johnson and Biden, however, were far more effective in office, devising and getting through Congress landmark legislation that had eluded their predecessors. The Johnson-Biden skill set, Ganesh concluded, was quite different from the Kennedy-Obama one; those two onetime veeps knew how to play the inside game and used that skill to enact major progressive legislation. Unfortunately, that skill set may have little to do with a president’s public presence and identity. (The last Democratic president to have both skill sets was FDR.) Biden’s most important legislative achievements— a recovery act that saved the nation from a recession, a revival of American manufacturing, and a huge boost to renewable energy— came as a consequence of his legislative legerdemain and of the widespread agreement within Democratic ranks as to their necessity. But they also came without any memorable Biden speeches or events on their behalf that would have identified him with these achievements outside of the circles of activists and political elites.”

What Biden has going for himself is that his opponent is Donald Trump, though not everyone remembers Trump being as toxic and DWT readers do. And not everyone understands as perfectly, as Jonathan Bernstein does, that Señor T was incredibly bad at presidenting. “Trump’s supporters,” he wrote, “remember the economy being great; his opponents remember his many forms of personal misbehavior; and everyone is massively repressing their memories of the pandemic… I understand why lots of people— not only Trump supporters— claim that the economy was great during his presidency and terrible during Joe Biden’s presidency. There are real reasons for those perceptions, and for the most part they’re just how these things work. But I have no patience at all for those who have contributed to the widespread and completely backwards sense that the US is currently at war after a peaceful four years when Trump was president. The reality of course is the opposite, with the active war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as well as US involvement in Afghanistan continuing through Trump’s presidency and ending after Biden took office— with well over 100 US troop deaths in those theaters during the Trump presidency that collectively received, what, one percent of the media attention of the 13 troop deaths in Afghanistan in August 2021? Not to mention that the US is killing a lot fewer people through drone strikes during the Biden presidency.”

Damn he was bad at the job.

I was one of the political scientists who participated in a “rank the presidents” survey and it was easy to place Trump dead last, given everything. 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.

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.

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.

I was born in 1948 when Truman was president. I have no real time recollection of Truman as president, just as ex-president. And, of course, I’ve read about him since. I’m going to rate every president since I was born on a 0-10 scale, zero being the worst and 10 being the best:

• Truman- 7 without the nukes, 0 with the nukes

• Eisenhower- 4.5

• JFK- 6.5

• LBJ- 7 without Vietnam, 0 with Vietnam

• Nixon- 1

• Ford- 0.5

• Carter- 5

• Reagan- 4.5

• Bush I- 4

• Clinton- 5

• Bush II- 2

• Obama- 5.3

• Trump- 0

• Biden- 5

And before I was born… were there any other presidents that rated a zero? I’d say so: Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Harding, Hoover, Tyler, Fillmore, Pierce. We’ve had a lot of really shitty presidents. None nearly as bad as Trump, though.