WASHINGTON (AP) – The most unlikely president, Donald Trump, reformed the post and broke its centuries-old rules and traditions while dominating national discourse like no one before.
Trump, ruling by whim and tweet, delved into the nation’s racial and cultural divisions and undermined faith in its institutions. His legacy: four tumultuous years marked by his dismissal, failures during the worst pandemic of the century and the refusal to accept defeat.
It shattered conceptions of how presidents behave and communicate, offering unvarnished thoughts and policy statements alike, removing the curtain for the American people while captivating supporters and unsettling enemies (and sometimes allies) both at home as abroad.
While the nation would be affected by choosing another figure as disturbing as Trump, it remains to be seen to what extent his imprint on the office itself, held by only 44 other men, will be indelible. It already overshadows the work of his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, who framed his candidacy as a repudiation of Trump, offering himself as an antidote to the chaos and dissent of the past four years, promising to restore dignity to the ‘Oval Office.
“For four years, this is someone who, with every opportunity, tried to extend presidential power beyond the limits of the law,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “He altered the presidency in many ways, but many of them can be changed almost overnight by a president who wants to point out that there is a change.”
Trump’s most enduring legacy may be his use of presidency traps to erode Americans ’views on his own government’s institutions.
From his first moments in office, Trump made an assault on the federal bureaucracy, casting a suspicious eye on career officials he considered “the deep state” and shaking American confidence in government officials and levers. . Believing that the investigation into Russian electoral interference was a crusade to undermine it, Trump pursued intelligence agencies and the Justice Department (calling the leaders by name) and subsequently sparked differences against the man leading the investigation, the respected special counsel Robert Mueller.
His other targets were legions: the Supreme Court for insufficient loyalty; the post office for handling ballots; even the integrity of the vote itself with its baseless claims of electoral fraud.
“In the past, losing presidents were always willing to hand over office to the next person. They were willing to accept the vote of the American public, “said Richard Waterman, who is studying the presidency at the University of Kentucky.” What we are seeing right now is really an assault on the institutions of democracy. ”
Current polls suggest that many Americans, and most Republicans, feel that Biden was elected illegitimately, damaging his credibility when taking office during a crisis and also creating a staff of deep suspicion. for future elections.
“This is a cancer,” Waterman said. “I don’t know if cancer can be eliminated from the presidency without hurting the office itself. I think he has done a lot of damage in recent weeks. “
Endangering the peaceful transfer of power was not Trump’s first attack on presidential traditions.
He did not publish his statements or divest himself of his business. He allocated government resources in a partisan manner and undermined his own scientists. He infuriated tweets against members of his own party and used government property for political purposes, including the White House as a backdrop to his renaming acceptance speech.
Trump used National Guard troops to clean up a largely peaceful protest in front of the White House to conduct a photo-operation. He appointed a Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, who needed a resignation from Congress to serve because the retired general had not been without a uniform during the seven years required by law. In this example, Biden has followed Trump’s example, nominating retired Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin to head the Pentagon, who will also need a resignation.
Trump’s disruption also extended to the world stage, where he questioned once inviolable alliances such as NATO and bilateral alliances with a number of allies. His “America First” foreign policy emanated more from preconceived notions of past events than from current facts on the ground. It unilaterally withdrew troops from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Syria, each time provoking bipartisan fire to undermine the purpose of American deployment.
It withdrew from multinational environmental agreements, an action scientists warn could have accelerated climate change. He distanced himself from the agreements that kept Iran’s nuclear ambitions under control, if not its regional malevolence.
And one can remember his presidency for having altered, perhaps permanently, the nature of the US-China relationship, obscuring hopes of a peaceful emergence of China as a world power and laying the groundwork for a new generation of economic and strategic rivalry.
While historians agree that Trump was a singular figure in office, it will be decades before the consequences of his tenure are fully known. But some pieces of his legacy are already in place.
He appointed three judges of the Supreme Court and more than 220 federal judges, which gave the judiciary a lasting conservative attitude. He repealed regulations and oversaw an economy that thrived until the pandemic hit. His presence increased voter turnout, both for and against, to record levels. He received unwavering allegiance from his own party, but hastened to set aside anyone who disliked him.
“President Trump has been the person who has returned power to the American people, not the elite of Washington, and has preserved our history and institutions, while others have tried to overthrow them,” the spokesman said. of the White House, Judd Deere. “The American people chose a successful businessman who promised to go to Washington, not to overthrow him, but to put him first.”
At times, Trump acted as a spectator to his own presidency, opting to tweet along with a cable news segment instead of diving into an effort to change policy. And that was one of the many ways Trump changed the way presidents communicate.
Carefully crafted political statements occupied the back of the site, replaced by tweets and off-rope comments to reporters about the murmur of helicopter blades. The speech hardened, with insults, personal insults and violent images infiltrating the presidential lexicon. And there were the lies (more than 23,000, according to a Washington Post count) that Trump threw out regardless of their impact.
It was this dishonesty that played a role in his defeat in an election that turned into a referendum on how he had handled the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now killed more than 300,000 Americans.
Day after day during his re-election campaign, Trump defied health guidelines and addressed massed, maskless crowds, promising that the nation would “turn around” the virus. He admitted that from the beginning it was proposed to minimize the severity of the virus.
He held super-broadcast events at the White House and contracted the virus himself. And while his administration led Operation Warp Speed, which helped produce coronavirus vaccines in record time, Trump also undermined public health officials by refusing to hug and suggest unproven treatments. including disinfectant injection.
“We have seen that Donald Trump’s style was one of the factors that contributed to his failure as president,” said Mark K. Updegrove, presidential historian and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. “His successor may regard his presidency as a precautionary tale.”