Talking About the Trump Presidency: Is Donald Trump a bad president or does the media exaggerate his faults?

Is Donald Trump a bad president or does the media exaggerate his faults?

Donald Trump is not a good President. Never has been, and based on his performance so far, never will be.

I was born eight months before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, so I was in no position to contemporaneously judge the performances of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson or the guy who came after him, Richard M. Nixon. When I grew older, though, and had studied American history enough to understand the tragedies of the Vietnam War and Watergate, I considered LBJ and Nixon to be, tragically, the worst Presidents in my lifetime. LBJ…for escalating a war that his generals knew they could not win; Nixon…for his role in keeping that war going for his own political purposes and, of course, for the many cases of abuse of Presidential power that culminated with the Watergate scandal that ended his presidency in shame and dishonor.

I also don’t think highly of George W. Bush, who got us involved in an unnecessary war in Iraq in 2003 based on false reports that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction hidden away somewhere.

Still, compared to the ineptitude and sheer crassness of Donald John Trump, Sr., even Richard “I Am Not a Crook” Nixon looks (almost) like a Boy Scout in comparison.

Starting from the early days of his Presidential campaign, Trump has been a rude, crass, narcissistic con man who exploits the divisions in American society for his own aggrandizement. He coddles white supremacists, looks benignly on as right-wing nutjobs post bombs to prominent Democratic Party officials, expresses satisfaction when an African-American member of Congress has his house broken into and tells other members of Congress (all of whom are women of color) to “go back to where they came from.”

Not very Presidential of him.

REPORTER: Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?

TRUMP: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that's the way it is.

REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?

TRUMP: I do think there is blame – yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don't have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn't put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

So, yeah, I do believe that Trump is a bad President. I’ll even go on record as saying that he is in the same category as James Buchanan, the President who preceded Abraham Lincoln and did nothing to prevent the secession crisis of late 1860 that precipitated the start of the Civil War.

And while there are partisan outfits (Daily Kos, Occupy Democrats) that exaggerate (but not by much!) Trump’s ineptness and malfeasance, I don’t believe that traditional media outlets such ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Time magazine, the Washington Post, or the New York Times do so.