As we enter the last year of either Donald Trump’s presidency or President Trump’s first term, it seems like an appropriate time to look back on the last three years. First, in looking at my posts about President Trump, I see I started out complaining a lot about what he did and his style of doing it. Just look at some of the titles of my posts in his first nine months:
- “Donald Trump at Seven Weeks. This Is Not Working.”
- “Donald Trump Meets Angela Merkel. Things Keep Getting Worse.”
- “Donald Trump: Will the Embarrassment Ever End?”
- “@realDonaldTrump: Such a Small, Small Man”1
But eventually, I got tired. It wasn’t making a difference (obviously), and I was saying the same thing over and over again. I got bored writing it. I can only imagine how bored people got reading it.
Since then, the protests have continued. I have agreed with many of the things the protesters complained about, as you can tell from the posts listed above (which are a mere representative sample). But, as I said, I eventually stopped, or at least slowed down, because I found it tiring to keep saying the same things over and over again. A lot of people apparently have not. In fact, they have seemed to get more and more upset as time has gone by.
The things that government officials and former government officials said about President Trump in the impeachment hearings the Democrats had, were horrible. But they weren’t surprising. Even as I was appalled, I wasn’t surprised. These things were why I didn’t vote for President Trump in the first place. I was worried about what he might do. And he has pretty much done it.
But even though he has been appalling, I haven’t been convinced he should be impeached (by the House) and convicted (and removed from office by the Senate) because of it. Those who have been calling for President Trump’s impeachment haven’t done a very good job in convincing people who aren’t devoted Trump-haters that he needs to be removed from office by impeachment (as opposed to defeated in November). It is true that he shouldn’t have held up the military aid to Ukraine, but it was held up for less than two months – and Barack Obama wasn’t going to give Ukraine things like antitank weapons under any circumstances, so it can’t be that the Democrats, or at least most of them, really care that much about Ukraine. It has seemed more like they are trying to find a reason, any reason, to justify what they already wanted to do. And so, President Trump was impeached by the House, but it very much looks like he won’t be convicted by the Senate.
Which has been obvious for a long time. And the fact that it has been obvious for a long time seems to infuriate those who hate President Trump even more. They are so convinced that President Trump is horrible (and so much more) that they can’t understand how anybody could not want to impeach him and convict him. And on and on it goes.
Which reminds me of something I wrote almost two years ago:
“If people really want Donald Trump to take Russian meddling with our elections seriously (which would be a good thing), maybe it would help if they stopped saying President Trump’s election was illegitimate because Russian interference got him elected. Just a suggestion.”
Obviously, nobody took my idea. The people who thought Russian interference elected President Trump continued to think that3 and tried to get him kicked out of office. But I wonder what good has come from it. Please understand that I am not saying people should have agreed with President Trump. I’m just asking what good has been done by constantly trying to remove him from office, first on this ground and then on that ground and finally on that ground over there. Especially since it was most likely never going to happen, and, ultimately, nobody was convinced who wasn’t convinced before the whole thing began.
The question is whether the fury of the opposition to, and hatred of, President Trump really helped. I agree one should oppose President Trump’s policies if you disagree with them. And I agree that may need to be done strongly. I also understand that at times you have to do things because they are right. But still, you would like there to be some reason for the fury and outrage other than it feels good.
Looking back at the outrage over President Trump (as opposed to the opposition), you wonder whether, instead of challenging the legitimacy of President Trump’s election (because he couldn’t have been elected without somebody cheating) and instead of calling for his impeachment on whatever grounds were available at the time, it might not have been better to just challenge him on the merits of his proposals and the inconsistency and inconstancy of his policies. Those were solid reasons to oppose him. Might toned-down opposition have left everybody a little less bitter and polarized? Obviously, President Trump was going to be mean and nasty, but was it necessary to respond in kind? Even if it made people feel good, did it make the country better off? President Trump wasn’t going to change. But did his opponents need to react like him? In fact, maybe if they hadn’t been so strident, they might have made those who don’t hate President Trump as much as they do, a little less defensive and a little more willing to listen to what is bad about President Trump’s policies and proposals.
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1 There were more, too. You just can’t tell it from the titles of the posts.
2 As I said at the time, regarding the protests: “You almost had the feeling that, if the protesters had been as active last fall, they wouldn’t have had to be protesting in January.”
3 For at least some people, it was almost as if President Trump was so obviously bad that he couldn’t have been elected without some sinister outside force working to elect him.
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