“Yes, I know, he’s 78, he’s not as sharp as he used to be, he lies all the time, he has cheated on his wives, he makes racist comments, he is a convicted felon, and he tried to carry out a coup after he lost the last elections. But he was a good president,” a Republican friend told me recently.
1. The
national debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion to $28 trillion during Trump’s four years in office, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
2.the U.S. economy under Trump grew by an overall 6.8%. By comparison, it grew by 8.4% in the Biden years.
3. Trump left office
with 3 million fewer jobs than there were when he entered the White House. Granted, that was largely because of the pandemic, but Biden has added nearly 16 million jobs since then.
4. Granted, inflation was lower under Trump than under Biden. The pandemic disrupted supply chains from China and made consumer prices soar in America in 2021 and 2022. But inflation has since fallen to 2.4%, close to its pre-pandemic levels.
5.On democracy, Trump undermined democratic institutions and the rule of law like no other American president in recent memory. He is the first U.S. president who tried to stage a coup d’etat to stay in power.
6, On foreign policy, Trump weakened America’s standing in the world by picking fights with the closest U.S. allies while at the same time embracing dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
7. On crime, hate crimes
increased by 28% during Trump’s term and hate-motivated murders, mainly committed by white supremacists, reached their highest number in 28 years, according to FBI statistics.
Trump has exacerbated racial hatred in the country since he started his 2016 campaign falsely declaring that most Mexican undocumented immigrants are “rapists” and are “bringing crime” to America. In 2017, he said that there were “very fine people” among white supremacists and the anti-racism demonstrators who were protesting against them in Charlottesville, Virginia.
8. On immigration, Trump never completed the border fence nor got Mexico to pay for it, as he had promised in his 2016 campaign. Trump now claims to have built much of the current 654 miles of border wall, but most of it was already in place and repaired or upgraded during his years in office, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
Andres Oppenheimer
x.com
he’s an embarrassing twit
