Editor’s Note: For another viewpoint, see Point: Look to History to Define President Trump’s Legacy.
Donald Trump will be remembered as the worst president in American history. His legacy includes: overseeing the most corrupt administration in American history; enabling the grandest handover of policymaking to corporations of all time; exhibiting the most overt and vicious racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia of any administration in modern times; plunging the United States into an economic crisis due to mismanagement of the pandemic; and rushing the globe toward climate catastrophe at the exact moment when the world needed the United States to pivot away from fossil fuel reliance.
The defining failure of Trump’s disastrous presidency will be the coronavirus pandemic. The coronavirus would have posed a great challenge to any president. Unfortunately, the country had the worst possible president in office at the worst possible time.
As a result of Trump’s epic failures, more than 400,000 Americans have already perished from the pandemic — and the number is expected to surge in coming months, with the Biden administration rushing to contain an utterly out-of-control virus supercharged by Trump’s incompetence. If you have any doubt that this horrific death toll should properly be laid at the feet of Donald Trump, consider that the U.S. COVID-19 incidence and death rate is triple that of Canada. If the United States experienced a fatality rate comparable to Canada’s, we would have suffered 250,000 fewer deaths. A quarter million lives!
Trump’s pandemic mismanagement revealed many of the worst features of his presidency: unparalleled incompetence, cruelty, callousness, narcissism, science denial and a fake populism that shaded into fascism.
Trump — who claimed “a natural instinct for science” — sidelined the world’s best infectious disease scientists, preferring instead his own musings about injecting bleach or the advice of crank scientists whose coronavirus guidance was, effectively, to do nothing.
He made the simple lifesaving act of mask-wearing into a bizarre ideological issue, convincing millions to refuse masks and thereby endanger themselves, their families, their communities and the nation’s well-being.
Trump followers bullied and threatened public health officials for doing their jobs and trying to save lives. His administration displayed utter incompetence in procuring and distributing PPE. It failed to give any meaningful guidance, let alone material support, to businesses or schools about when to open and how to operate safely.
And when a vaccine finally became available, the Trump administration failed to coordinate distribution plans, even lying publicly about available stocks. Most shockingly, perhaps, Trump never cared to comfort to the millions of Americans who lost loved ones, or to the millions who became sick with COVID.
What we can hope for is that history will also mark the Trump presidency as a turning point, with the Biden administration marking not just a return to “normal,” but demonstrating a new readiness to confront America’s great challenges.
Such a pivot begins by confronting the pandemic, with a science-based approach to containing the pandemic and expediting the distribution of vaccines.
It requires mobilizing the necessary resources — trillions of dollars — to address the pandemic and the economic fallout, with money not just for unemployment and small businesses but to buttress public transportation, open schools safely, address hunger, prevent mass evictions and more.
Alongside that spending, new initiatives are needed to rebuild our economy, achieve full employment, build worker power, and tackle the grotesque wealth and income inequality that underlies our political divisions.
We need a democratic renewal that takes power from the wealthy and corporations and hands it to We the People. That means getting Big Money out of campaigns, ending Dark Money, and overturning the Supreme Court’s horrible Citizens United decision. It also means protecting everyone’s voting rights and ending voter suppression.
The Biden administration also must move beyond rhetoric to concrete measures to advance racial justice. It can make great steps forward by addressing the pandemic’s disparate effects, wealth inequality and the democracy deficit, but much more will be needed.
And the administration must launch a scaled-up effort to meet the greatest challenge of our time: the threat of catastrophic climate change. Taking on entrenched interests, it must speed a national and worldwide transition away from fossil fuel reliance and toward renewable energy and energy efficiency. At stake is, literally, the fate of humanity.
On every one of these challenges — and many others — the Trump presidency will be remembered for taking the country in the wrong direction. It’s a monstrous legacy.
For President Biden, there is opportunity amid this pervasive failure: the times call for greatness.
We all must hope that Biden can rise to the moment — and push him to do so.
