Trump
saved the worst for last
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 20, 2020 at 2:24 p.m. CST
Presidents usually
experience a poll bump after they leave office. George W. Bush, for
example, nearly doubled his popularity rating
between 2009 and 2018. If there is any justice in the world (admittedly a big
if), that won’t happen with Donald Trump. If posterity needs any reminder of
how awful he has been, all it will have to do is look at his final days in
office. Trump has saved the worst for last — and there is still a month to go
before he is evicted from the White House.
Trump’s singular
focus since the election has been on overturning the results even at the cost
of destroying U.S. democracy. For more than six weeks, Trump has been spewing
conspiracy theories about nonexistent election fraud — claims that have been
rejected in 59 court cases and counting, including by
Trump-appointed judges.
On Friday, as
the New York Times first reported, Trump met at
the White House with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a pardoned felon, and
attorney Sidney Powell, who was fired from the
Trump legal team after promoting conspiracy theories about
the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez too wacky even for Trump. Trump
reportedly discussed with the duo Flynn’s idea of declaring martial law and
having the military “rerun” the election — or, failing that, appointing Powell
as a special counsel to probe (nonexistent) election fraud.
These dangerous ideas
may not be implemented, but simply the fact that they are being discussed marks
a new low. Never before in U.S. history has there been a record of a president
discussing a military coup to stay in office. Is there any doubt that if Trump
could find any active-duty generals willing to carry out this plot against
America, he would give it the go-ahead? In this instance, all that is
preserving the Constitution is the military’s fidelity to the rule of law.
While Trump is
focused like a laser on his election grievances, he has all but checked out of
the fight against a pandemic that has already claimed the lives of more
than 316,000 Americans and
that is projected to kill more than 560,000 by April. This past March, after
repeatedly claiming that the coronavirus would miraculously go away on its own,
Trump said that if it killed fewer than 200,000 people, that would mean his
administration has “done a very good job.” So he has failed by his
own metric.
“I think he’s just
done with covid,” one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Post. If only covid-19 were done with
us. The only time Trump even mentions the pandemic anymore is to brag about the
vaccine rollout, yet he has ignored pleas from his aides to tout the safety of
the vaccine, push for a national testing plan or promote universal
mask-wearing. The latter step alone could save more than 50,000 lives by April 2021, according to
the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The pandemic isn’t
the only threat to America that Trump is ignoring. U.S. government and
corporate computer systems have been massively infiltrated, apparently by
Russian hackers. “The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to
overstate,” warns Trump’s former homeland security
adviser Thomas P. Bossert. “The Russians have had access to a considerable
number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months.” Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo attributed the assault to Russia. But Trump
took to Twitter, contradicting Pompeo, playing down the
severity of the attack and claiming that “it may be China (it may!).”
Thus the Trump
presidency ends as it began — with Trump denying the reality of Russian
cyberattacks and serving as an apologist for the dictator in the Kremlin.
Gregory F. Treverton, the former chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, told The Post that Trump “behaves so much
like a paid Russian agent. If you look at the string of his actions and
pronouncement, the only consistent interpretation that you can logically draw
is that he’s in their thrall.”
Treverton joins
a long line of intelligence and law
enforcements veterans — including former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former
director of national intelligence Daniel Coats and former CIA director Michael Hayden —
who have concluded that Trump must have been compromised by the Kremlin. Such
allegations haven’t been proved, but so much that Trump does lends credence to
them.
There are many other
Trump transgressions since the election. He has purged the senior leadership of the
Pentagon and installed conspiracy-mongering loyalists in their place. He has
fired a senior cybersecurity official,
Christopher Krebs, for attesting that the election was free of fraud. He unloaded on
Attorney General William P. Barr for not doing more to politicize his
department, leading to Barr’s departure. He has
pulled U.S. troops out of Somalia just as a new al-Shabab plot to attack the United
States was uncovered. He has held holiday parties that undoubtedly spread
covid-19. And there is certainly worse to come — including a pardon-palooza
that would put Trump cronies and family members beyond the reach of the law.
If future generations
are tempted to romanticize the Trump presidency, all they will have to do is
look at his final days to see why historians are likely to regard him as the
worst president in U.S. history.