The Financial Times reported on November 8 that after four years of chaos and thousands of tweets, President Donald Trump, a former reality star, will leave the White House, and a record number of Americans will let him reap the consequences: You’re fired! The full text is excerpted as follows:
Trump has long taken his bid for president seriously. However, in June 2015, when he announced his candidacy when he came down the Trump Tower elevator, he said he would build a wall on the southern border to keep Mexican “rapists” and “homicides” out, which shocked the political scene.
Republicans in power regard the real estate tycoon, who is well known for reality TV, as a joke. And a year later, they became jokes.
After an unorthodox primary election, he won the Republican nomination. By launching the nativistic “America First” campaign, he defeated 16 sophisticated Republicans who never found a way to deal with people nicknamed them, such as “incompetent Jeb Bush” and “Lying Ted Cruz”.
Again and again, he proved that he owned Teflon coating (not affected by any scandal). When he mocked John McCain, the Republican war hero, everything didn’t change. When a video showing him bragging about having sex with women, it didn’t have any political consequences.
After his victory, Republicans said he would become like a president. However, the naivety of this view was exposed on the day of inauguration.
When official photographs show that his inauguration was less than the audience when Barack Obama took office in 2009, he sent press secretary Sean Spicer to the podium and lie about audience figures.
This is a foreboding that people will politely describe the president as having only “accidental relationship” with the truth.
The first few months of his entry into the White House fell into chaos that became the norm afterwards.
The upheaval in the Trump administration began with the firing of Michael Flynn, the first national security adviser. After calling Reins Plibers, one of the four White House Chiefs of Staff, “paranoia”, he also fired communication assistants, including Anthony Scaramucci, who only worked for only 10 days.
On the international stage, Trump has been criticized for showing his favor to Turkish President Erdoğan and North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un.
At a press conference with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, he refuted the views of his own intelligence services and accepted the Russian president’s denial of Moscow’s interference in the U.S. election.
At the same time, he mocked American allies leaders, from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to French President Emmanuel Macron because they disagreed with his approach.
At home, he failed to achieve some of his most important tasks – building the wall and signing a large infrastructure bill. But he sent three conservative justices to the Supreme Court and passed a huge tax cut.
Another example of the Teflon nature of President Trump’s presidency until this weekend was his attempt to get Ukraine to interfere in the U.S. election by throwing dirty water on Biden, which led to impeachment by the House — but acquitted in a Senate trial.
After Bill Clinton in 1998 and Andrew Johnson 130 years ago, Trump is the third president to be impeached in the House of Representatives.
In the four years of turmoil, several moments stand out. In 2018, he was attacked for saying “there are very good people on both sides” after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, became deadly.
He was slammed after authorities fired tear gas to disperse peaceful protests by anti-racists near the White House so that he could take photos in nearby churches.
But the controversy over his legacy is his handling of COVID-19, which he says will disappear like a “miracle”. Since then, the epidemic has killed nearly 230,000 Americans. His inconsistent reactions were highlighted when he urged people to take disinfectant to protect themselves.
Coupled with his refusal to condemn racism, his handling of the pandemic ultimately led to his defeat as the Republicans who lived in the suburbs joined Democrats to win an opponent he mocked as “Drowsy Joe.”
