TRUMP AT TWO YEARS

The Trump presidency has now lasted two years, which is appropriate marker for a grown man who has the temperament of a toddler.  For over seven hundred and thirty days our country has been lead by an erratic, dishonest, bigoted, self obsessed braggart.  Here are some things to look back on:

-He has, according to the Washington Post, made false or misleading claims over six thousand times.  He has repeated some lies so often that fact checkers had to add a new rating (The Bottomless Pinocchio!).

-He has flagrantly disregarded the emoluments clause of the Constitution, allowing his global businesses to continue while engaging in foreign policy.  His self named hotel near the White House has become a convenient way for foreign leaders to funnel money to his corporate interests.

-Has had over forty administration members fired, pushed out or resign.  These include such winners as Scott Pruitt, pushed out for numerous ethics violations, and Anthony Scaramucci, who's reign as White House Communications Director lasted only ten days.  Many of these people who have left described his White House as chaotic and out of control.  Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson admitted that Trump ignored briefings and advice and often had to be told that what he wanted to do was  illegal.   The chaotic nature of his administration was reaffirmed by two tell all books:  Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and Bob Woodward's  Fear: Trump in the White House.

-Gave prominent political positions to family members with no experience, including putting son in law Jared Kushner in charge of Middle East peace agreements, solving the opioid crisis, and justice reform, among other things.

-He has shown admiration for brutal dictators like Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte.

-He fired James Comey as head of the FBI and admitted that it was because of the investigation of Russian conspiracy in his campaign. Since then, he  has continually called Bob Mueller's Russia investigation a witch hunt, even as Mueller has racked up thirty three indictments or guilty pleas, including former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, former campaign chair Paul Manafort, and former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, who plead guilty to crimes made during the campaign, some of which he says Trump directed him to do.  He also repeatedly belittled and eventually fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself in the Russia investigation.  He topped this off by privately meeting with Russian leader Vladamir Putin and then announcing that he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies concerning Russian interference in the election. 

-Time and time again he has attacked any negative coverage of him as fake news, at one speech he intoned “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news...just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”  At one point the New York Times reported that he tried to raise the postage rate for the company Amazon because its owner also owns the Washington Post.

-He threw out the Iran deal, the Transpacific Trade Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord without any negotiation or plans to replace them.

-Refused to criticize white supremacists after a rally in Charlottesville North Carolina turned violent, with one woman dying after an avowed bigot ran his car into a group of counter protestors.  As one post on the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer put it "Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us....
He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate … on both sides!"

-He started a trade war with China and several American allies, bragged that trade wars are easy to win, and when China responded with tariffs on American farmers from red states, gave twelve billion dollars to them in subsidies.

-Had a border policy that caused the separation of families, including a breast feeding mother, and then tried to blame it on the Democrats, even as his then Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the policy as biblical.

-Rolled back numerous environmental protections and discredited a study on the dangers of climate change from his own administration.  He continued to do so even as unprecedented natural disasters occurred.  After forest fires ravaged the state of California, he claimed it was because of the state's own mismanagement, and bizarrely added that the president of Finland told him about the need to rake forests as a way to prevent such fires. 

-Signed a tax cut that enormously favors the wealthy and corporations, and added over a trillion and half dollars to the national deficit.

-Appointed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and defended him even as Christine Blasey Ford forcefully testified in congress that he had once sexually assaulted her.  He also defended Alabama US Senate candidate Roy Moore after credible accusations of him sexually pursuing under age girls emerged.

-Pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, the bigoted sheriff who ordered his men to carry out racial profiling in defiance of the law, compared his prisons to concentration camps and cost his state millions in legal fees.

-In his two years as president, hate crimes against Muslims, Jews and immigrants have risen, with some attackers even chanting "Trump!  Trump!" during the attacks.  He has done nothing to address this, and has doubled down on his verbal assaults on immigrants, documented or not.  He was once quoted as asking why the US had to take people from "shit hole" countries.

-Recently the New York Attorney General charged his charitable Trump organization with outright crimes, saying that it  “used charitable assets to pay off the legal obligations of entities he controlled to promote Trump hotels, to purchase personal items and to support his presidential election campaign.’’

-As president he spends hours every day watching TV and has played golf one hundred and sixty seven times, after previously criticizing then president Barack Obama for doing the same.  As a candidate he once said "I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.”  He has also described himself as a "stable genius" and says he deserves an "A plus.  Can I go any higher?".

-He has taken marching orders from Fox News personalities and other right wing media bloviators. This has lead him to shut down the government to demand tax dollar spending for his wall with Mexico, the same wall that he repeatedly said that Mexico would pay for.

The one piece of good news in all this is that the high profile nature of the office of the presidency means there are currently investigations into  nearly every aspect of Trump's businesses,  with previously unknown crimes possibly (perhaps even likely) to appear sometime soon.   And while there is some debate as to whether a sitting president can be indicted, it's possible that he might have a well deserved jail cell waiting for him once he leaves the White House.