45.DONALD TRUMP (I'm the greatest)
Born: June 14, 1946, New York, New York
Died: he won’t go away
Term: January 20, 2017- January 20, 2021
Political Party: Republican
Vice President: Mike Pence
First Lady: Melania Knauss Trump
Before the Presidency: Donald Trump was the son of real estate mogul Fred Trump and he grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Queens, New York. He is said to have been difficult to deal with growing up. His father, thus, sent Donald to the New York Military School where he seemed to enjoy the military drills. However, joining the military was the last thing on Donald’s mind as he was able to get out of the Vietnam Draft with college and medical deferments and, finally, a high draft number.
Trump majored in business at Fordham before transferring to the Real Estate program at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1968 and returned to the family business in New York.
In the seventies, while the Trump family eyed real estate investments all over the US, Donald kept his interests closer to home. He invested in Manhattan skyscrapers and founded the Trump Organization and made himself President with his father as Chairman. By the end of the decade Trump was already beginning to become a household name.
Trump followed in his father’s footsteps and developed vast political connections from both parties, all with the intent to get tax breaks for his businesses. And he continued to expand, building Trump Plaza, the Trump Tower, in Manhattan. Later in the 1980s, he would get involved in the Casino business in Atlantic City and seemingly half the casinos were named after him from a second Trump Plaza to the Trump Taj Mahal. He also was seen as a major player in the failed USFL Football League as owner of the New Jersey Generals.
Trump, though, overplayed his hand a bit, and after lenders cracked down on his unusual financial practices, he was forced to sell part of his empire and had to live on a budget for a time.
But if Donald Trump was ever good at anything, it was in reinventing himself. He finagled his debts for decades before the gambling empire finally crumbled by the mid-2010s. Despite this, he stayed in the public spotlight through a scandalous second marriage that seemed to help his image more than not, a controversial stint as owner of the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss Universe pageants, and even being the subject of a how to book known as the Art of the Deal.
And then, Donald Trump broke into show business. In 2004, with the help of Survivor producer Mark Burnett, he hosted a TV reality show called the Apprentice. In this program, Trump basically played himself as a CEO and would revel at telling contestants they were fired. It became a huge ratings success and it only ended after Trump announced his candidacy for President.
So, in the classic tradition of being able to get anything you want as long as you’re filthy rich to begin with, Trump, by 2015, had owned at least a dozen golf resorts and eight hotel properties in the United States alone, plus various real estate holdings throughout the world. He was said to be at least $650 million in debt. With that in mind, he would simply respond, “I love debt.”
So, now we know a little about Donald Trump, the businessman, but what about Donald Trump the politician? Well, while never really active directly, he had switched parties on a number of occasions and even considered a run on the Reform Party ticket for President in 2000. He even supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Senate. But until Obama’s second term at least, he seemed content on promoting himself by way of the Apprentice.
But being a TV reality star wasn’t enough to soothe Trump’s oversized ego, so he ventured into the political arena and jumped head first into the birther movement demanding that Obama prove he was actually born in the United States (Apparently, a write up in the Honolulu paper from 1961 was fake news). Trump backed off a little after Obama showed his birth certificate, but he was far from done. He developed feuds with various celebrities, notably Rosie O’Donnell, and kept in the news as he kept people guessing as to if he would actually run for President.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President.
Summary of offices held: Well, he did own the New Jersey Generals of the USFL and ran the Miss USA pageant. He also hosted the Apprentice on NBC from 2004-2015.
What was going on: Mass shootings, Covid outbreak, Black Lives Matter
Scandals within the administration: The whole Trump administration was a scandal from Michael Flynn, the Russian hacking scandal, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Trump’s Godfather tactics with Ukraine trying to find dirt on Biden (first impeachment), and, of course, the denial he lost re-election that led to the Capitol Insurrection (second impeachment that even got a few Republican votes)
Why he was a good President: Look, he wasn’t, period, okay?
Why he was a bad President: Oh, God, where do I start? He practically did nothing beyond promoting himself. His White House was perhaps the most dysfunctional in history. The few he appointed that wanted to do right were quickly fired so Trump could be surrounded by only yes men. He nearly alienated all our allies even calling Denmark’s female President nasty because she refused to sell him Greenland.
And, of course, there was Covid, which he bungled by simply denying it even harbored a health threat. A million deaths later and the ex-President is now urging people to get vaccinated after seeing his base slowly dwindling.
And, most egregious of all, he all but instigated the January 6th insurrection. Yeah, he did the most for this country since Abraham Lincoln all right.
What could have saved his Presidency: It would have been nice if he had simply used some common sense. I mean, who else would have suggested bleach as a cure for Covid?
What could have destroyed his Presidency: At the risk of being publicly executed if Trump or DeSantis do end up in the White House, there really isn’t much to salvage from this disaster of the Presidency, and of the man himself.
Election of 2016: Trump, as per his M-O, made his grand entrance on an elevator at Trump Tower with his wife, Melania, to announce his candidacy. No one especially took it very seriously, after all, he was just a pompous reality star, right?
But as 2015 came to a close, it was obvious that Trump was getting interest from a sector of the party that felt ignored, mainly less affluent whites who couldn’t understand that the biggest problem was themselves. Trump knew this and exploited it to no end as he railed against immigration in particular saying we would build a wall and Mexico would have to pay for it. It looked like Trump would garner some popularity as an underdog much the same way outsiders like Rick Santorum and Herman Cain had before him.
But Trump was running against 16 other Republicans including Jeb Bush and Florida Senator Mark Rubio, seen as the early front runner. With so many candidates and with a very large pocketbook, Trump actually had a fighting chance.
Trump won the New Hampshire primary in a field with no clear cut favorite, and while he didn’t garner a large number of delegates initially, he stayed in the first tier. Even then, the Republican establishment didn’t take him very seriously.
But they also didn’t properly gauge the anger at the group they too had most exploited, the white working class. For decades, they had appealed to their darker, racist, tendencies in order to maintain power never thinking that it may one day backfire on them.
And backfire it did with Donald Trump being the fuse. Trump managed to humiliate Rubio out of the contest and got away with suggesting Ted Cruz’ father had something to do with the Kennedy Assassination. If anyone dared criticize him in the press, he simply dismissed it as fake news. His followers, some of whom would respond much the same way brown shirts would react to outsiders in pre-Nazi Germany, lapped it up. Even a desperately late stop Trump movement by Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich couldn’t stop the momentum and Trump was reluctantly nominated in a rather lavish convention all arranged by Trump himself.
The Democrats were, of course, salivating, figuring this buffoon would be the easiest win since LBJ over Goldwater and, had someone more likable been nominated, that very well may have been so.
But the Democrats, already experts at taking defeat from the jaws of victory, did it again. For, Hillary Clinton was again demanding her coronation and this time there wouldn’t be a Barack Obama to stop her. Indeed, Obama was secretly endorsing her as he convinced Biden, who had tragically lost his son to cancer that year, not to run. With little competition in the form of Conservative Democrat James Webb, Former Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland, and avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton seemingly had a clear run at the nomination.
But there was an element that was equally frustrated with the Democratic Party. They certainly loved Obama, but they despised Hillary. But who could be the alternative?
Enter Bernie Sanders. Like Trump, he was brusque at best, but unlike Trump, whose detractors certainly saw him as an unstable egomaniac at best, Sanders was seen as a well meaning curmudgeon. And, indeed, Sanders fascinated the younger voters in particular with his strong sense of idealism, threatening as it may have been to the Capitalist establishment.
But it’s quite likely Hillary Clinton had it rigged in her favor early on. The DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was a Hillary Clinton lapdog and she did everything she could to make the road as rocky for Sanders as possible. She found a way to deny Sanders access to a list of Democratic voters over a minor misstep. She reinstated the access after a large uproar by the public.
Despite the roadblocks, Sanders proved to be formidable, winning New Hampshire and staying within range until Clinton won the California primary. Only then did Sanders concede and then only with some guarantees of a more even playing field for the next election cycle.
So, we were stuck with Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump for the General election or, as the creators of South Park put it, a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. In other words, America was screwed.
And it was an ugly campaign to be sure, mainly from Trump’s end. Some of his rallies became violent. Any woman that crossed his sights was referred to as nasty. And an E-mail scandal involving Clinton was brought to light- by the Russians. It was obvious early on that Putin was supporting Trump behind the scenes, Trump was even publicly encouraging it. Finally, FBI director James Comey put the final nail in Clinton’s coffin when he announced, just before Election Day, that he would reinvestigate the E-mails. He backed off on the statement just before the election but by then it was too late.
In what would be considered one of the biggest upsets in American History, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton and half of America mourned what was expected to be the end of the United States as we knew it.
And James Comey would get fired by Trump anyway.
First term: Trump clearly expected his Presidency to play out much like his reality show. He had his Press Secretary brag about the record crowds at his inauguration which was actually only sparsely attended, many of the spectators actually being protestors. Indeed, about the only legislative agenda he had on his mind in 2017 was his attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare, something that would finally fail when Senator McCain surprisingly went against the party when it was obvious there would be no replacement. It also became obvious early on that you didn’t dare disagree with the Donald or he would condemn you on his Twitter feed and you’d hear the wrath from his hypnotized supporters.
He scared aides early on when he would ask questions such as “why can’t we use the nuclear weapons?”. He also had to answer to an investigation that the Russians meddled in the election on behalf of Trump. And, of course, he simply dismissed it as fake news.
The other domestic issue was on immigration. Trump did indeed attempt to procure funds to build the wall between Mexico and the US, but he would only get mixed results. And it was obvious that whatever the US did, Mexico wasn’t going to pay for it. More cruelly, and with the advice of his neo-Nazi advisor, Stephen Miller, he signed off on a policy to separate children from their parents when they crossed the US border. This amounted to cruelty that went even beyond the Japanese Internment Camps of the 1940s.
Yes, basically, Donald Trump was, and is, a cruel man, and his followers seemed to get off on it. The people Hillary Clinton once called deplorables felt enabled and would violently counterprotest such as with the protest in Charlottesville to bring down the statue of Robert E. Lee. That protest ended tragically after a woman was run over by a white supremacist. Trump, when pressured for a response, simply noted there were good people on both sides. Well, no one accused him of being a politician.
By 2018, and with only a controversial tax cut for the wealthy as his lone accomplishment, Trump’s numbers, though wildly divided between the parties, was at an all time low overall. And that reflected in the midterms as the Democrats took the House. Thanks to numbers that favored them, the Republicans would be able to hang into the Senate and that would enable Trump to shift the Supreme Court to the far right by the end of his term.
By 2019, the Trump Administration seemed to be in rare form as subordinates from the Vice President on down would publicly praise him as if he were a great emperor. Indeed, Trump wanted to run the US as an emperor and admired strongmen such as Kim-Jong Un and especially Vladimir Putin. He also had re-election on his mind and surmised that his toughest opponent would be Joe Biden.
So, he took a page from Nixon and tried to strongarm Ukrainian President Zelensky to find dirt on Biden’s son. Apparently, Hunter Biden had worked for a company and spent some time in the Ukraine. When Trump held back promised military equipment, even the Republicans took notice. It was also the smoking gun Speaker Nancy Pelosi, reluctant up until then, needed to approve impeachment proceedings, thus, Donald Trump became the just the third President to be impeached, and the third to be acquitted, though this time, one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, had the guts to vote for removal.
Indeed, it looked like the Trump Presidential Reality Show was a great success even as the country was crumbling all around him. But a foe much worse than Joe Biden would stop the Trump Dynasty in its tracks. For a virus, likely originated in China, would plague the entire globe.
Originally called the Corona Virus (Now known as Covid), it began affecting the US in February 2020. It accomplished two things initially. One, it turned the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, into a household name, it also turned the US into a mask wearing nation for the first time in its history, something that previously only seemed to happen in China.
Of course, the US wasn’t ready for this devastating illness that would eventually kill more than a million Americans. President Trump, worried about a Wall Street crash hurting his election chances more than people dropping dead like flies, did very little on the onset, saying the virus would go away. When it was obvious the virus wouldn’t go away, Trump would lash out at reporters and expect gratitude whenever equipment was sent to certain states such as New York, which was especially hit hard in the early going. Indeed, it became a war between those who supported mask wearing mandates and those who thought wearing a mask was something comparable to a Communist plot.
The other great divide in 2020 started in Minneapolis when four policemen, with onlookers with smartphones witnessing, brought down an African American man named George Floyd. One policeman pressed against Floyd’s neck with his knee. Floyd could be seen begging for his life as he complained he couldn’t breathe but the cops wouldn’t relent. Ten minutes later, Floyd was dead, and the nation was awash in mostly peaceful and biracial protests.
Of course, that didn’t stop the MAGA crowd. There would be violent counter protests as one man was decked by a cop in Buffalo for example. Trump himself, infamously, had the Army clear out a peaceful protest at Lafayette Square so he could do a photo op at a local church. And this, all with Covid going on.
Needless to say, Trump wasn’t going to have an easy time winning election, but he did have hope. The Democrats had a knack at screwing things up after all and it honestly didn’t look all that good for them in the Congress this election.
And anyway, Trump couldn’t possibly lose.
Unless it was legitimate, of course.