The daily dramas of that era will fade away in time; the administration’s lasting mark is elsewhere.
The daily dramas of that era will fade away in time; the administration’s lasting mark is elsewhere.
S hould Donald Trump’s political career be finished, what will be the takeaways from his administration? I’d argue that what reporters have many times described as a nonstop bombardment of exciting news was in fact a relatively uneventful period.
Why, yes, I have heard that there’s a pandemic on. It is the major event of the Trump era, but it had very little to do with Trump.
Look at our close cousins, the U.K. Does anyone seriously believe that Americans would have tolerated its level of lockdown restrictions? At several points, you could be fined $300 for leaving home “without a good reason.” Neighbors were informing the police when they spotted someone they knew too far from home.
No Democratic governor went this far. No Democratic president would have pushed for this sort of thing. British-style restrictions would never even have been seriously contemplated in the United States. And it’s unclear whether this chillingly draconian set of policies did much good anyway. The U.S. and the U.K. have almost the same death toll from COVID — 1,980 per million here, 1,943 per million there. If the U.K. winds up doing substantially better than the U.S., it’ll be because of higher vaccine uptake there. But if you think vaccine uptake is not high enough in the U.S. in 2021, it’s not possible to blame Trump for that.
I don’t see anything remarkable about the American performance compared with that of similar countries. Italy and Mexico did a bit worse than we did; Spain and France did a bit better. The brief against Trump on this usually goes, “Well, he didn’t take it seriously until it was too late.” True, but so what? Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio didn’t take it seriously until it was too late. On March 6, Cuomo said, “The overall risk level of the novel coronavirus in New York remains low. . . . We have more people in this country dying from the flu than we have dying from coronavirus.” He then ordered nursing homes to accept COVID patients.
New York’s explosion of cases set up the entire country for the misery to come. In Cuomo’s case, his failure to respond was linked to his longstanding insistence on interfering with whatever his fellow Democrat de Blasio wanted to do. I’m baffled by any argument that insists Donald Trump is to blame for the actions or inactions of de Blasio and Cuomo, or for their seven-year feud. I’m not aware of any actual substantive matter that even de Blasio and Cuomo claim is Trump’s fault. When it comes to the coronavirus, the feeble best that Trump’s critics can do is repeat the fake news that the president told us to inject bleach. Even Politifact threw a flag on that one. On the other side of the ledger, how much credit should we give Trump for the amazing success of Operation Warp Speed? Not a small amount, I’d argue. Every expert assured us that no vaccine would be available in 2020.
The early drafts of the history of the Trump administration contain an awful lot of fake news. It’s not tenable to shriek, “Trump has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands,” especially now that, by that logic, Joe Biden would also have the deaths of hundreds of thousands on his hands. The 300,000th COVID death in the Biden era is coming soon, maybe even before winter starts. At some point, the media will accept that the virus doesn’t care which party holds the White House.
Was January 6 an insurrection? No, it was terrible, and Trump was to blame for it, but it was about as organized as a child’s tantrum. Did Trump collaborate on some criminal scheme with Vladimir Putin? No, and the Mueller Report turned out so embarrassingly for the Left that I’m guessing that the whole mishegoss will simply be overlooked by history. Trump was impeached twice, ineffectually, but the historical takeaway will, I suspect, simply be to normalize ineffectual impeachments as party fan service whenever the House stands in opposition to the president. Now that two of the last four presidents have been impeached, the mystical quality is gone. It’s bound to become a routine occurrence.
Trump didn’t start any wars. He presided over a booming economy. He happened to be president when there was a murder after a racist rally in Charlottesville, but presidents are seldom remembered for whatever crimes are committed during their terms. True, he negotiated the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it’s anyone’s guess how it might have concluded under Trump. Perhaps Trump would have proved unable once again to overrule his supposed underlings if they had pushed back, as they probably would have.
What are we left with? It was fashionable, for a while, for right-leaning Trump opponents to sarcastically say, “But Gorsuch!” after whatever the Trumpian outrage du jour was. The funny thing is, no one is going to remember all of those silly Twitter spats — the jibes at Little Rocket Man, the silly boasts, the misspellings and bad grammar. Trump was, from a character standpoint, unfit to be president. He was unprepared. He was unserious. He wasted time watching himself on TV and picking fights with reporters. He was in many ways embarrassing to the country.
None of this is substance, though. Trump’s true legacy really is Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. And Brett Kavanaugh. And Amy Coney Barrett. President Reagan’s picks were Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor. George H. W. Bush put David Souter on the high court. George W. Bush gave us the disappointing John Roberts. By the end of this Supreme Court term, we will learn the answer, but if Trump’s appointees rule correctly, his administration will be vindicated as a remarkably successful one. The rest will fade away.