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WorshipTrumpe

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  The inexplicable tolerance for outlandish, sexist, homophobic, self-serving  rhetoric continues as our dear leader challenges democracy itself. His admiration for strong man leaders can make one wonder if he is just jealous or actually admires their ability to gain control of a government.  His followers find him so admirable that he seems to ascend to the level of deity for them, wanting more and more of his personality to descend upon them. To them,  his presidency is the greatest in the history of the world, and his accomplishments outshine any other president. His campaign and rally promises to have mexico  pay for a great wall, to create a better and cheaper health care for all ameicans, and to never play golf again as he would be too busy governing to take any time off seem to be immaterial His bragging about his adultery, his sexual assault lawsuits, his challenge to democratic elections seem to endear him to his base.   Letter to the editor Dec 24, 2020, 11:00 AM
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Failure45

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  Autopsies on President Donald Trump 's failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election results are piling up. Some point to judges who  rejected  his unfounded claims of voter fraud. Others  argue  that democratic norms moved state election officials, prosecutors and civil servants to uphold the rule of law at critical moments. Still others  claim  that Trump's incompetence doomed the project from the start. But these views miss an important piece of the puzzle. Trump's four-year effort to subvert democracy failed in large part because he was historically unpopular and politically weak relative to other would-be autocrats. Some unloved politicians manage to subvert democracy, but a common path to autocracy in the modern world is for a genuinely popular leader to use high public approval ratings and overwhelming legislative victories to cow opponents and undermine institutional checks on their power. The threat to democracy is less an unpopular incumbent trying to steal an
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TrumpeLegacy

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The Legacy of Trump     T o assess the legacy   of Donald Trump’s presidency, start by quantifying it. Since last February, more than a quarter of a million Americans have died from COVID-19—a fifth of the world’s deaths from the disease, the highest number of any country. In the three years before the pandemic, 2.3 million Americans lost their health insurance, accounting for up to 10,000 “excess deaths”; millions more lost coverage during the pandemic. The United States’ score on the human-rights organization   Freedom House’s annual index   dropped from 90 out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump, below that of Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13 international organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of refugees admitted into the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000. About 400 miles of barrier were built along the southern border. The whereabouts of the parents of 666 children seized at the border by U.S. officials r
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TrumpIncomp

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    A common root cause of ineffective and incompetent leaders is the lack of emotional intelligence. What’s ironic is that Mr. Thompson, who is a Trump cheerleader (as evidenced in his Closing the Deal column of 11/2/20 ), doesn’t see that he perfectly described Donald Trump. Being generous, the president lacks four of the five high-level categories of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills.An easy argument can be made for all five if you accept that Trump’s motivation is solely for when it’s something for his benefit. Mr. Thompson says that people with low emotional intelligence often slip into a role they are not qualified for, but their flaws and incompetence are eventually exposed and they don’t last. That was obvious to most of us when Trump was elected president and even before. Unfortunately, since Republican senators were cowards and refused to do the right thing, we were stuck with Trump for four long yea
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FourVirusFailures

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    The first is a sin of omission — the failure to act when clear duties arise.  The federal government’s response to covid-19 began poorly in early February. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a test for the virus that was contaminated and initially useless. But when testing faltered, the Trump administration did not rise to the moment, even though there were solutions at hand — employing the effective World Health Organization test, or allowing labs to develop and use their own. Weeks passed as the health bureaucracy churned.  The second error was a sin of commission — the direct betrayal of a duty.   Even as events rushed forward, the Trump administration actively and deceptively played down the extent and seriousness of the crisis. As the danger became undeniable, the president and others in his administration doggedly denied it. “ It’s going to disappear ,” said President Trump. “ We have it so well under control. ”“The numbers would tell us that 1
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