Was Trump the Worst President in the Modern Era?

A Boxing Day Reflection on a Bogus Narrative, with Thoughts on an Older and Better One

Today is Boxing Day, that magical day in countries like the UK, Canada, and Australia where the lowest ranking employees make all the decisions, and the highest ranking do the lowliest of tasks. Its origins go back to Charles Dickens’ time, when it became tradition for employers to give their poorest employees a nice present in a box.

It’s kind of a world turned upside down, where the privileged pretend, at least for a day, to give a shit about their socioeconomic inferiors, and for those who aren’t total jerks to act in a humane and compassionate way, at least for a day.

Note that the American ruling class has never stooped to acknowledge such a custom that allows such questioning of the established social order.

Right now there is an accepted axiom in Democratic Party circles, repeated endlessly by Democratic politicians, that Donald Trump was the worst President in modern times. Anyone who disagrees with that assessment is either a right-winger or delusional or both.

Well, they’ll just have to call this aging Marxist delusional, because I’m going to name four of them, and being an equal opportunity socialist, two are Republicans and two are Democrats. I’m going to center my argument on health care for very personal reasons. You see, my 32 year old daughter suffered from mental illness, never got the treatment she needed because we never had enough money, and died of an opioid overdose just two days before what would have been her 33rd birthday on December 23rd.

Ronald Reagan was on his way out of the White House when she was born, and he had set the immediate table for what was to come, namely by eliminating federal funding for mental hospitals. They mostly closed down completely, the capitalist insurance companies who managed health care saw no profit in providing mental health care to the masses, and the mentally ill whose families were not wealthy were literally turned out into the streets. The homeless population of mentally ill people swelled, but most Americans didn’t want to think about them and the problem was ignored.

There is a plethora of other capitalistic, anti-labor, anti-worker, and warmongering things that Reagan did; perhaps the most damaging was his message that government was the problem and the capitalist system was always the preferred solution, a message that has become a largely unquestioned tenet of both of the dominant American political parties.

Reagan also brought us to within about yard or a meter of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a war that didn’t happen only because his Vice-President and the Pentagon quietly put the kabosh on it. Later, Nancy Reagan made him watch movies like Testament and The Day After, and actually turned him around on that issue.

Donald Trump promised a beautiful free health care system for all Americans, with no details, and I never had any expectations this not-too-bright narcissistic psychopath with all the skills of a good used car salesman or carnival barker was ever serious about it. He continued the old wars, didn’t actually start any new ones, and started the withdrawal from the Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan was far worse than Trump.

In 1992, I stood less than 20 feet from Bill Clinton in Denver’s City Park and heard him promise to veto NAFTA and to extend affordable health care, including mental health care, to all Americans. In 1993, he fast-tracked NAFTA through Congress, and turned his entire health care initiative over to his wife, who mucked it around, fucked it all up, and let it die without it ever getting a floor vote in either legislative branch.

Among other terrible things, Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed corporations to take over most of our media and kill off real journalism. One shining example of Slick Willie’s work is the Washington Post, now fully trusted by all loyal Democrats, and totally owned by Jeff Bezos. Some reliable source.

The mental health care I’d hoped to find for my then-wife, who had inherited her illness, was never anything to the Clintons other than a campaign pitch.

Bill Clinton did far more long term damage to this country than did Donald Trump, who did nothing his predecessors had not already laid the groundwork for.

His immediate successor, George W. Bush, was by far the worst President of modern times, in my opinion. His Fraudulency came to office in a Supreme Court-backed coup that killed the last vestiges of the American Republic in 2000, allowed a terrorist attack on 9/11/2001 to happen, used the shock of those events to destroy our civil liberties with the Patriot Act, and deliberately lied his way into the Iraq War.

In comparison to George W. Bush, Donald Trump was practically harmless.

By 2008, I was long divorced, remarried with stepchildren for all practical purposes, and dealing with an adult daughter suffering from severe mental illness and getting little help from the authorities or the medical system to help her. Obama’s promise of affordable health care for all motivated me to do everything I could to help him get elected, and he did.

Then it was Clinton Redux, and probably worse. Obama never even considered putting the public option on the table, much less fighting for it, and all we got was Mitt Romney’s Heritage Foundation plan that is more accurately called the Health Insurance Corporation Enrichment Act of 2009.

Obama didn’t end any wars, but he did start a few more. His Drone Tuesdays where he picked the targets were war crimes, he started another war in Syria and turned Libya into an anarchical hell hole complete with open air slave markets, which continue to this day.

For the working class, Obama bailed out the banks and evicted millions of homeowners during the Great Recession. For refugees from imperial American policies in Central America, Obama built concentration camps on the border, which Trump proceeded to fill to overflowing, but Obama built them, not Trump.

Obama even dredged up the 1917 Sedition Act to persecute journalists who exposed his war crimes to the world and, even more importantly to his huge ego, tarnished his legacy.

Donald Trump was complicit in his tax cut for the rich and in the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, but I can’t reasonably say that what he did overall was worse than what Obama did, because it wasn’t.

Donald Trump was an incompetent buffoon of a President, but Barack Obama was a well-groomed con artist who served the kleptocracy and was well-rewarded by it afterwards, as his mansion on Martha’s Vineyard and his non-library monument to his ego in Chicago testify.

Barack Obama was a worse President than Donald Trump.

Perhaps, on this Boxing Day, Americans should ask themselves why they put up with this executive office which has mostly harmed them for the last 40 years. Or, for that matter, any of the three branches of the federal government. None of them deserve either our trust or our loyalty.

I’ll end with a quote by another former President written long before he was elected:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.

My daughter’s gone from a country that never cared about people like her, but her spirit that loved animals and hated injustice still lives, as does the spirit of the American Revolution, in spite of everything the five presidents I mentioned above have done to kill it.

Thanks for reading. Good night, and good luck.