Trump Has Nearly Destroyed the United States in His 4 Years as President

Trump is the first president to question the United States’ moral authority as the leading power in the civilized world.

That has, indeed, turned out to be possible. It was possible to pressure officials, threaten them, and coerce them into falsifying the state votes in the U.S. presidential election. Donald Trump and his supporters didn’t even have to pretend that their demagogic statements about falsified election results were nothing more than a desire to stay in power by any means.

And if, for the sake of achieving this end, he had to resort to falsely accusing his opponent of fraud, then so be it. Trump made these false accusations because from his perspective and that of his supporters, it is a good thing, aimed at saving America, and of course, Trump himself. There is an obvious confusion of concepts. Whatever these people don’t like, they call false. And whatever they like, they don’t consider to be lies, even if the evidence that these are lies is obvious.

By resorting to such behavior, Trump is no different from the dictators he has admired during his time in the White House such as Vladimir Putin or Kim Jung Un. After all, Russian and North Korean rulers are also busy with confusing ideas.

In fact, there is no reason to be surprised. We are not dealing here with the culmination of Trump’s presidency, but with its natural course, and its end.

Trump has behaved this way since the first day of his election campaign and since the first day of his presidency. We are not even talking about his political and economic decisions, but about his style of government.

Trump did not hide the fact that he was treating the country as a business. In this case, the company is run by a tyrannical owner who fails to show a shred of respect for his colleagues and employees.

Few people remember now how Trump made an appearance on the international scene. At the first NATO summit, in order to position himself before a television camera and stand out front, he rudely pushed past Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic.

This gesture by the head of the most powerful country in the world, shoving aside the leader of a small country, was evidence of his pettiness, impudence and demonstrative rudeness. It was as if he thought people would merely shrug at such arrogance.

The nightmare was by no means limited to a single summit, and everyone who witnessed this behavior were deeply ashamed. What is terrifying is that Trump’s supporters have never felt ashamed. Regardless if they approved of everything their idol did, they have always found an opportunity to justify his behavior, not just in the United States, but in Ukraine.

Trump deleted information about U.S. assistance to Ukraine from his campaign platform. We know now that Paul Manafort, the odious former chairman of Trump’s election campaign and former adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, had a hand in it. As much as Trump openly admired Michael Flynn, an equally odious commentator for Putin’s TV channel, he admired Manafort, and has pardoned him in the last days of Trump’s term.

Trump did not hide his desire to reach an agreement with Putin, openly pressuring Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and trying to force the former television comedian to engage in a campaign against his Democratic opponent Joe Biden during the presidential election.

But Trump’s supporters said he was putting pressure on Russia, providing military assistance to Ukraine, and ending the Nord Stream 2 project. Although Ukraine only received U.S. military aid after Congress put pressure on Trump for his actions, Trump tried to force the Ukrainian government to find incriminating information about Biden’s son. If Trump had won the election, Congress would not have overridden his defense bill veto, as it has recently done, and Nord Stream 2 would have been completed in the near future.

No matter how harsh U.S. sanctions might be, they have always been belatedly imposed. Instead of getting ahead of his favorite, Putin, Trump seemed to be chasing him like “Tom and Jerry.”

But this doesn’t matter to Trump’s supporters at all, and I can already imagine reading the insulting comments in response to this article. I also expect to read comments about the numerous outstanding achievements of the incumbent president, and against his successor.

And this is further evidence of how people have been enthralled by Trump’s unbridled impudence. People who would express bewilderment if people they knew tolerated a domestic tyrant, someone who constantly humiliates people and lies to members of their own family, do not even recognized they are now equally unenviable victims. But they are victims in a political sense; citizens who readily justify any unseemly act of their idol. Because they love him. They love a man who has compromised the moral authority of the United States as the leader of the civilized world and the most important outpost against authoritarian regimes.