A Miserable End to a Presidency That Never Should Have Been

For a majority of Americans, 12:00 noon on January 20, 2021, cannot come soon enough.  On that date America will say good bye to an individual who I hope history will view as the worse occupant of the White House in American history save none. Donald Trump has always been an amoral, self-absorbed narcissist - his business and reality TV career always made that truth clear - who should never been elected to any high office and, but for the moral bankruptcy and racism of all too many Americans, he should have never occupied the White House.  Now, in the waning days of his disastrously regime, Trump is reminding all with a conscience and a shred of decency why he was always unfit for high office.  The coronavirus pandemic is raging, millions of Americans face the loss of benefits within mere days which will leave them facing financial ruin, and all Trump can obsess about is this loss of the 2020 election as he regurgitates lies, untruths and insane conspiracy theories.  Anything rather than face the reality that a majority of Americans see him for what he really is: a loser and a dangerous sociopath. A column in the Washington Post by a former Republicans looks at the abject failure and disaster which has been the Trump regime.  Here are excerpts:

President-elect Joe Biden, merely by speaking about two national crises of historic magnitude (the economy and the pandemic), reminded us that even in his final weeks in office, President Trump prefers to focus on insane conspiracies meant to overturn a democratic election rather than on imminent threats to Americans’ lives and livelihoods.

At a Friday news conference, the relaxed and calm incoming president spoke to the country. “Earlier today, the November jobs report was released,” he said. “It’s a grim report. It shows an economy that is stalling.” The current president did not bother to address it. Biden recognized that “it’s deeply troubling that last month’s drop in overall unemployment [to 6.7 percent] was driven by people who were dropping out of the labor market altogether. … Over the last three months, 2.3 million more people are in long-term unemployment — by far the largest increase on record.”

Biden encouraged lawmakers to pass a compromise stimulus bill and promised that more help is on the way. (“Americans need help, and they need it now, and they’ll need more come early next year.”) [Trump] The current president was nowhere to be seen. While clinging to office and to his delusions, Trump has abdicated responsibility and declined to keep up the pretense he is governing.

As for the covid-19 vaccine, Biden let on that the Trump administration has no plan to get Americans vaccinated. . . . . What has the current administration been doing to facilitate vaccinations? Next to nothing, apparently. Biden’s prediction of 200,000-plus more deaths by the end of the year may be horrifyingly accurate.

Trump has been consumed not with the dual threats of a worsening economic recession and the pandemic but with denying his defeat. Court after court in more than 40 cases rejected his baseless accusations of fraud.

Republicans’ political fortunes have fared no better. They began 2017 with the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress; they leave with only the possibility of a narrow majority in the Senate. Their base is more crazed and alienated than ever before. To the very end, most Republican members of Congress adhered to their reputations as spineless enablers of a destructive, racist and utterly incompetent president. . . . . the GOP is now simply a cauldron of writhing resentment and paranoia — a party that survives by spinning a web of lies and terrifying its own voters.

Our only hope is that the Republicans who remain in Congress will be as ineffectual in obstructing progress as they and their defeated president were in governing.