Apocalypse Trump - The Final Days

[SBXT]

Thanks for the thread Vermin

Many of our fellow Americans have fallen for fake news. 😢

Joe Biden will be president in a little over 12 hours

[Vermin93]

This news has got to be the ultimate insult to Trump...next to losing to Joe Biden.

Trump stock performance falls short of Obama, Clinton

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/5...-obama-clinton

President Trump is closing out his time in office with a significant increase in the stock market, but has fallen short of stock gains seen under predecessors former Presidents Obama and Clinton.

From Trump's inauguration day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose from 19,827 to 30,930 on Tuesday, a 56 percent increase.

That increase is below the 73.2 percent rise the Dow saw in Obama's first term, or the 105.8 percent increase under Clinton's first term.

A similar trend was true for the S&P 500, which gained 67.8 percent under Trump, rising from 2,263 to 3,799. It gained 84.5 percent in Obama's first term, and 79.2 percent in Clinton's first term.

The sole exception in the past three decades has been former President George W. Bush, who saw the Dow fall 3.7 percent and the S&P fall 12.5 percent in his first four years in office.

The figure will be unwelcome news to Trump, who frequently touted the stock market's performance as a sign of his economic acumen and business-minded policies.

The outgoing president still highlighted the market in a farewell address Tuesday.

"The stock market set one record after another, with 148 stock market highs during this short period of time, and boosted the retirements and pensions of hardworking citizens all across our nation," he said, adding that 401(k)s reached new highs.

"We’ve never seen numbers like we’ve seen, and that’s before the pandemic and after the pandemic."

Other indicators also show that Trump fell short of several of his major economic campaign promises.

Trump, who campaigned on the unlikely promise to wipe out the $14.4 trillion debt held by the public, oversaw a whopping 50 percent increase in the debt level instead, leaving it at $21.6 trillion.

While a significant portion of that increase was due to emergency spending to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half is attributable to the combination of unfunded tax cuts and increases in domestic and military spending on top of the debt's previous growth trajectory.

Trump also failed to achieve the 3 percent annual growth rate he promised on the campaign trail and in office, let alone the 4, 5 or 6 percent rates he occasionally touted.

He did oversee the largest quarterly economic growth on record in the third quarter, which rose at an annual rate of 33.1 percent, but that was largely a bounce back from the worst-ever quarter on record with a 31.4 percent drop in the second quarter amid the pandemic and 5 percent the previous quarter.

The one area where Trump's economic legacy shone was in unemployment, which fell to 50-year lows of 3.5 percent under his watch, and saw historic lows among groups such as African Americans and Latinos.

But as he leaves office, those figures are elevated as a result of the pandemic, with unemployment at 6.7 percent, including 9.9 percent for African Americans and 9.3 percent for Latinos.

[Vermin93]

Of course he has...

Trump Has Discussed Starting a New Political Party

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/tru...FPqr5fMzg1Bkbs

President Trump has talked in recent days with associates about forming a new political party, according to people familiar with the matter, an effort to exert continued influence after he leaves the White House.

Mr. Trump discussed the matter with several aides and other people close to him last week, the people said. The president said he would want to call the new party the “Patriot Party,” the people said.

Mr. Trump has feuded in recent days with several Republican leaders including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), who on Tuesday said Mr. Trump deserved blame for provoking the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Polls show Mr. Trump retains strong support among rank-and-file GOP voters.

The White House declined to comment.

It’s unclear how serious Mr. Trump is about starting a new party, which would require a significant investment of time and resources. The president has a large base of supporters, some of whom were not deeply involved in Republican politics prior to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Third parties have typically failed to draw enough support to play a major role in national elections. Any effort to start a new party would likely face intense opposition from Republican party officials, who would chafe at the thought of Mr. Trump peeling off support from GOP candidates.

[Vermin93]

A historical and comparative analysis of Trump and the worst American presidents of all time. The full article at the link is worth a read.

The Worst President in History

Three particular failures secure Trump’s status as the worst chief executive ever to hold the office.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...istory/617730/

President Donald Trump has long exulted in superlatives. The first. The best. The most. The greatest. “No president has ever done what I’ve done,” he boasts. “No president has ever even come close,” he says. But as his four years in office draw to an end, there’s only one title to which he can lay claim: Donald Trump is the worst president America has ever had.

In December 2019, he became the third president to be impeached. Last week, Trump entered a category all his own, becoming the first president to be impeached twice. But impeachment, which depends in part on the makeup of Congress, is not the most objective standard. What does being the worst president actually mean? And is there even any value, at the bitter end of a bad presidency, in spending energy on judging a pageant of failed presidencies?

It is helpful to think of the responsibilities of a president in terms of the two elements of the oath of office set forth in the Constitution. In the first part, presidents swear to “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States.” This is a pledge to properly perform the three jobs the presidency combines into one: head of state, head of government, and commander in chief. In the second part, they promise to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Trump was a serial violator of his oath—as evidenced by his continual use of his office for personal financial gain—but focusing on three crucial ways in which he betrayed it helps clarify his singular historical status. First, he failed to put the national-security interests of the United States ahead of his own political needs. Second, in the face of a devastating pandemic, he was grossly derelict, unable or unwilling to marshal the requisite resources to save lives while actively encouraging public behavior that spread the disease. And third, held to account by voters for his failures, he refused to concede defeat and instead instigated an insurrection, stirring a mob that stormed the Capitol.

Many chief executives have failed, in one way or another, to live up to the demands of the job, or to competently discharge them. But historians now tend to agree that our worst presidents are those who fall short in the second part of their pledge, in some way endangering the Constitution. And if you want to understand why these three failures make Trump the worst of all our presidents, the place to begin is in the basement of the presidential rankings, where dwell his rivals for that singular dishonor.

[Vermin93]

And now it's time for this project to bring a desperately needed dose of reality to the most politically indoctrinated tribe of right wingers and conspiracy believers I've ever witnessed to come to an end. I feel quite certain no minds were changed and the toxic confirmation bias that inhabits the P/CE remains stronger than ever, but it was a fun endeavor.

We close tonight with some interesting analysis regarding the legacy of the Trump presidency.

History Will Crush Trump

Donald Trump's presidency is over. Next comes judgment.

History is a harsh judge because it winnows mercilessly. There is just so much of it that even an individual as consequential as a U.S. president gets, at most, one or two lines.

George W. Bush: 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

Bill Clinton: Impeachment.

George H.W. Bush: First Iraq war.

Ronald Reagan: Bringing down the Soviet Union.

Jimmy Carter: Malaise.

Nixon: China and impeachment.

Lyndon Johnson: Vietnam and the Great Society.

JFK: Cuban missile crisis and his assassination.

These judgments aren’t always fair, in the strict sense. Jimmy Carter never said the word “malaise” in the speech for which he is most remembered. Bill Clinton had lots of other things happen during his two terms—from economic expansion to conflicts in the Balkans. The Berlin Wall fell after Reagan left office. But they’re fair in the cosmic sense because as history continually whittles away at your legacy, it dispenses with both trivialities and technicalities and focuses on bedrock truth.

Reagan’s policies did contribute in very large part to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Jimmy Carter’s Crisis of Confidence speech was about malaise, which was the defining characteristic of that period in American history.

The further back you go, the more ruthlessly reductive history is. There are plenty of American presidents who are so historically inconsequential that they don’t even get one line.

So how will Donald Trump’s presidency be remembered by history? We already know the answer.

He oversaw a disastrous response to a global pandemic, because of which more than 400,000 Americans died on his watch.

That’s it. That’s his legacy. And if he gets a second line in the history books it will be this:

He incited an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol which led to a second impeachment.

Anyone who tells you that Trump will be remembered for the economic expansion of the first three years of his term is a fool. History has nothing to say about the economic performance during Clinton’s eight years. The Reagan economic boom is only a footnote to his tenure. Look: Barack Obama gets almost no recognition for the economy of his final seven years and that took place the day before yesterday.

Ditto Trump’s Supreme Court picks. Here are some of the more notable SCOTUS justices of the last half-century:

Antonin Scalia

William Rehnquist

Thurgood Marshall

Whizzer White

Unless you do law for a living, I doubt you can tell me who put them on the Court. Dwight Eisenhower put four justices on the Court. Not only can most people not name any of them, but that bit of trivia isn’t even a footnote on Eisenhower’s historical entry.

So make no mistake: Donald Trump’s legacy is already etched in history. And his legacy is death and destruction.

That is all he will be remembered for. Everyone trying to feed you happy talk today about his “accomplishments”—The great Trump economy! So many judges!—is simply trying to alibi themselves or their clique.