As five Republican presidential candidates gather Wednesday night for a make-or-break debate, they should focus not on each other but on the candidate not there. They must make the case that Donald Trump was a bad president who would be even worse, an utter disaster, if he took office again.
If Trump is to be defeated in the Republican primaries, the other candidates need to explode the myth that his presidency was successful. While Trump was president, almost the only things he did right were ones any Republican president would have done, perhaps even better than he did, or that others in the administration did despite Trump as much as because of him. More importantly, Trump failed at so many things that it’s tough to keep track of them all.
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Start with inflation: President Joe Biden may have detonated price hikes with his plethora of bad policies, but it was Trump who assembled the dynamite and attached the fuse. It is an undeniable fact that even before the pandemic hit, Trump was the biggest spending non-World War II president in history in raw numbers, inflation-adjusted numbers, and in terms of debt compared to the size of the economy. As some of us noted back then, there’s usually a lag time between inflationary causes and effects, and we predicted that inflation would start howling early this decade — specifically because of Trump’s spending and his jawboning the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates artificially low.
If consumers don’t like the prices of gasoline and groceries, they should blame Trump almost as much as they blame Biden.
Speaking of the pandemic, Trump made a mess of it. He spent two key months refusing to take it seriously. Then, when it began spreading on the U.S. mainland, his early briefings were disasters. He said it would go away almost immediately, as if by magic. He said it could be eradicated by injecting disinfectant or using ultraviolet light. For several months, he encouraged school shutdowns. His behavior was embarrassing, and his incompetence was essentially deadly. Somehow, the United States, with all its advantages, experienced the world’s third-highest number of coronavirus deaths per capita.
Trump’s two biggest campaign points in 2015-16 were the trade deficit and border security. He screwed up both. The trade deficit grew hugely under Trump while U.S. manufacturing declined. More illegal immigrants crossed the border in Trump’s four years than in either of President Barack Obama’s two terms. Trump built barely any new border “wall” than Democrats originally had agreed to build, and of course, Mexico didn’t pay a dime for wall construction.
Except regarding Israel, where he stopped Obama’s practice of getting in the way of Israel’s already-developing relations with five Arab or Muslim states, Trump’s foreign policies were largely disastrous. He bugged out of Syria so incompetently that Russia secured a U.S. airfield and huge caches of U.S. equipment. He embarrassingly said he “fell in love” with the murderous, lunatic North Korean leader Kim Jong Un while failing to rein Kim in. He guaranteed success in an effort to overthrow Venezuela’s communist government but suffered a humiliating fiasco. And he set the stage for disaster in Afghanistan by releasing 5,000 Taliban thugs for nothing in return.
Trump torpedoed the best chance of repealing Obamacare by publicly undermining the first House plan as “mean, mean, mean.” Rather than draining the “swamp” or defeating the “Deep State,” he lost badly to both. And he enabled the Biden Democrats to implement all their awful policies of the past three years because his deportment and results were so bad that Republicans, especially a series of horrible candidates he endorsed in primaries over stronger Republicans, lost and lost and lost again.
And then, of course, there was his cowardly and irresponsible behavior leading to and during the U.S. Capitol riot, not to mention what certainly looks like chronic law-breaking on multiple unrelated fronts.
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Trump already has run off the “first string” of possible Republican appointees, leaving nothing but dregs for a second term, which Trump seems more intent on using for personal revenge than for the public good. Trump is older, less healthy, more self-indulgent, and more emotionally unstable now than he was during his first term.
In sum, Trump is dangerous. He cannot be trusted to carry the Republican banner next year, much less, Lord forbid, again occupy the Oval Office. None of the other candidates can win the nomination unless they take on this awful man and tell the truth about him.