Trump treated the country as badly as he treated E. Jean Carroll
Quin Hillyer
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The verdict finding former President Donald Trump liable for sexual battery does not tell us much new about Trump’s character. His defenders are wrong, however, to say his performance as president somehow makes his awful character unimportant.
From a conservative vantage point, the record shows Trump was a bad president.
TRUMP ORDERS JURY TO PAY $5 MILLION IN DAMAGES TO CARROLL
Take Trump’s signature issue of illegal immigration.
The ultra-progressive Barack Obama presided over a significant reduction in Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal immigrants in the final three years of his term, from 486,651 to 415,816. Trump, in contrast, made almost no progress in this regard from year two (404,142) to year four of his presidency (405,651), and also presided over an explosion in crossings during his third year (to 854,501). (I excluded the first year of each term because administrations overlap in January, and policy changes take a while to implement.)
That doesn’t even take into account Trump’s abject failure to build his promised border wall, much less make Mexico pay for it.
Trump shut down the government for a record 35 days, wreaking havoc on taxpayers looking for IRS help over the single issue of wall funding. His battle amounted to one of the worst negotiations in history — in the end, he secured less wall funding, at $1.3 billion, than the $1.6 billion Democrats had themselves offered in the beginning. Meanwhile, taxpayers shelled out $9 billion in back pay for federal employees, half of that for work that wasn’t being done.
Now take domestic (non-defense) discretionary spending — the part of the federal budget most directly subject to presidential control. In his first three years, Trump took it from $586 billion to $658 billion — worse by $72 billion overall, plus a second-year spike all the way to $722 billion. Under Obama, this category of spending went from $540 billion to $531 billion in his third year — a decrease of $9 billion.
Trump can’t even blame inflation, which accounted for only $36 billion of his $72 billion hike (not even counting the immense mid-year spike). He can’t blame the coronavirus pandemic, either, because I am deliberately omitting the year when the virus hit.
Meanwhile, on other initiatives, even with Republican majorities, Trump failed to repeal Obamacare. Trump himself torpedoed the best Republican chance by publicly calling it “mean, mean, mean.”
On Trump’s other favorite issue, the trade deficit was higher each year under Trump than it was in every single year under Obama. Manufacturing jobs actually rose by 386,000 in Obama’s second term, but the U.S. had lost manufacturing jobs under Trump even before the pandemic hit.
Likewise, Trump’s diplomacy, apart from Israeli affairs, was a disaster. He negotiated with the Taliban directly and released 5,000 vicious prisoners while committing the U.S. to a precipitous pullout from Afghanistan (which President Joe Biden later botched).
He gave the Russians a major foothold in Syria while abandoning a U.S. base and huge stores of American supplies. He embarrassed the free world by kowtowing to North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un and saying he “fell in love” with the murderous nut-job. And he committed U.S. prestige to regime change in Venezuela, only to fail spectacularly.
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And that’s just a partial listing of Trump’s abject policy and political failures.
In sum, Trump is liable for battery — not just against E. Jean Carroll, but against the whole U.S. body politic.