I guess that is that. The inauguration is over and done with, and Donald Trump is once again our president, for better or for worse. I didn’t vote for him, and I suspect that the next four years are going to be a wild ride. And despite what the doomsayers in the news media as well as social media have said, we’re going to make it through this and get to the other side. After all, we survived one Trump presidency, and we can survive another. Watching how quickly a lot of things normalized after another administration was in charge after Trump left office in 2021 lends some credence to that.
It’s kind of interesting to watch Trump’s rise to politial prominence over the last decade or so and kind of put it together. I feel like it started with his questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship. Recall that during the 2008 election, a lot of noise had been made about Obama’s citizenship, and therefore his eligibility for the presidency. At the time, it was considered fringe, i.e. only lunatics, referred to as “birthers”, believed that Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen. Obama released his certificate of live birth from the state of Hawaii, and that was more or less the end of it. Obama was elected, and we all moved on. Then fast forward to around 2011, and Donald Trump, then just a rich New Yorker with bad hair, a big mouth, and a reality TV show, started making a lot of noise about the whole birth certificate thing, years after the issue had effectively been settled, with the idea that the certificate of live birth was insufficient, and that he wanted Obama’s long-form birth certificate. A lot of other people joined in on this, and it became an issue all over again, even though the issue had been settled, and Obama had been president for more than two years by this point. I figured that the Obama administration would ignore it and just keep on doing their thing, and let the whole matter burn out because the administration won’t bite. After all, Trump was just a nutter. He was a rich and influential nutter, but a nutter all the same. But then, surprisingly, the Obama administration took the bait, and released his long-form birth certificate in response. Suddenly, Trump just got a lot of legitimacy in the political sphere. He made a lot of noise, and the president responded. If the president had simply ignored it, I wonder if Trump would have just faded off of the political stage and we would only see him whenever he was opening a new hotel or firing a contestant on his TV show. I wonder if the Obama administration’s responding to Trump’s noise was the biggest mistake that the they made during their eight years, even though they had no way of knowing it at the time. I appreciate the rationale that they gave for it, that they were trying to put the issue to bed once and for all and move on from it, but the action gave legitimacy to the revival of a long-settled issue and enabled Donald Trump. Sometimes you have to let things die a natural death rather than attempting to execute them, even if you find them undesirable to have around, and this was one of those things where they should have simply ignored it and let it fizzle out on its own.
Then for as much as I hate to admit it, you also have to hand it to Trump for keeping himself relevant during Biden’s term. He did what most former presidents do not do, and he kept himself in the public consciousness all throughout Biden’s four years in office, sometimes overshadowing the sitting administration. Admittedly, it wasn’t all good coverage, but he stayed in the public’s view and in the headlines for the entire four years that he was out of office. It’s like I’ve said about other GOP politicians like Larry Hogan of Maryland and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia when they won their respective gubernatorial campaigns. As much as I disagreed with their politics, they did their homework, and they earned it, while their Democratic opponents ran some pretty bad campaigns. The same could be said for Trump. He played the long game and came out on top, plus the Democrats ran an awful campaign, just like in those gubernatorial races. I predicted it back in July and then said it again in November. The Democrats lost the race the moment that they started attacking Biden and forced him out of the race. No one really wanted a President Harris, even if we voted for her, so it’s not surprising that she lost. Might Biden have won reelection if he had stayed in and resisted the calls to withdraw? Maybe. But we’ll never know. Likewise, we’ll never know how the Democrats might have done if Biden had not run for reelection in the first place and a proper primary had been conducted, rather than having the candidate foisted on the voters in that “We have overturned your primary, this is now your candidate, and we expect you to vote for them,” kind of way (and here, all this time, we thought the superdelegates were antidemocratic). Clearly, someone forgot the way that elections work, where, as Randi Rhodes has said, you fall in love in the primaries and then fall in line for the general election. All I know is that for all of their shenanigans, the Democratic Party got the result that they deserved, and maybe – just maybe – they’ll learn something from their failure, and that they absolutely did it to themselves.
However, when it came to Trump’s 2024 campaign, thinking about it after the election was over, I found it somewhat strange that they went back to “Make America Great Again” as a slogan. As the thought goes, in 2016, Trump was a new figure in national politics, he had new ideas, and that slogan represented that idea, that he was going to come in and restore America to greatness (though what greatness he was referring to is up for some debate). Love it or hate it, though, it was a really good slogan, and it was difficult to counter it. Then in 2020, the Trump campaign couldn’t use it because they were the incumbent administration. “Keep America Great” just didn’t have the same ring to it as the original, but to pull out the original slogan again in 2020 would have signaled that they didn’t do what they said that they would do during their four years in power. In 2024, Trump was once again running from the outside, and used the original slogan of “Make America Great Again”. The thought was twofold. Were they saying that Biden royally screwed the pooch in his four years and America is no longer great? Or was this a tacit admission that they had failed in the first go-round and wanted another bite at the apple to try again? It’s also possible that no one gave it that much thought and they just ran with it because it worked in 2016. Regardless of which one it is, they took home the prize, so it doesn’t really matter, because whatever the reason was, it worked.
One thing also worth considering is that we have a completely unaccountable Trump this time around. Trump has now been elected to the presidency twice, and the 22nd Amendment prohibits anyone from being elected to the presidency more than that. Therefore, he’s termed out. Typically, the way that we hold a president accountable while in office is by having them stand for reelection to continue in office, but Trump was tossed when he stood for reelection, and was only elected again after sitting out a term. This is a first for America, inaugurating a new president who is ineligible to run again right out of the gate (Grover Cleveland, the only other president to serve nonconsecutive terms, came before the ratification of the 22nd Amendment, and therefore was eligible to run for another term in 1896, though political realities made that an impossibility). Also, technically speaking, Trump doesn’t need his supporters anymore, because with his being ineligible to run in future elections, they can do nothing else for him. Considering the economic situation that many of them are in, I hope that they don’t get screwed over too badly.
Couple the ineligibility for future elections with various court decisions that more or less codified former president Richard Nixon’s line of, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” and we have a man in the White House who can do anything he wants and has to answer to no one for it. Congress already demonstrated through two impeachments back in 2020 and 2021 that they are not willing to hold him accountable for his actions in office (and that was with a less friendly Congress than he has now), and by virtue of his accession to the presidency, all of the criminal prosecutions that he was involved with before have more or less evaporated, meaning that he will face no consequences for any of his actions. He could conceivably go out on the streets of New York City and shoot someone at point blank range in front of a crowd of witnesses, and never have to answer for it. If that’s not a somewhat sobering thought, I don’t know what is.
Meanwhile, I find it interesting how now-former president Biden spent his last day in office, issuing preemptive pardons to Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, and the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. The idea was to prevent these people from becoming targets of legal prosecution by the Trump administration by making any potential prosecutions moot because any crimes that may potentially be alleged are covered by this blanket pardon. It’s that little way of saying, “You guys are as slippery as eels, but I gotcha this time!” and in the case of Fauci and Milley, allowing them to retire from public life in peace. However, as understandable as these pardons are, I also feel like it sets a dangerous precedent for the future. While Biden’s intentions with this use of the pardon appear to have been noble, a future president might not be so noble with its use. It would not be very hard to imagine a situation where a future president might ask someone to do something illegal for them, and in the process of planning it, be like, “I’ve got your back with a preemptive pardon.” In that case, so much for the rule of law. So I have mixed feelings on that use of the pardoning power right now, but we’ll see how it plays out in the future. Considering that Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of almost all of the people involved in the January 6 attack on his first day in office, I suspect that Biden may have opened a Pandora’s Box with that one that will have far-reaching consequences.
Looking towards the future, with Trump’s being ineligible to run again, I am really interested to see what the field will look like for the presidential race in 2028. After all, for the last three election cycles, the GOP has been dominated by Donald Trump. With him ineligible, the GOP field will look very different than it has in recent years, and there will likely be lots of new candidates who will throw their hat in. Same goes for the Democrats. That will probably look very different than it has in recent years as well. After all, Biden is retired. Harris will hopefully never run again. The Obamas and the Clintons are old news. I look forward to seeing them all hash it out and see who ends up prevailing on both sides. I’m deliberately not going to speculate on who those candidates might be, because that’s a long way off, and there’s a midterm election between now and then, and how the parties perform in that election will have quite a bit of influence on what happens in 2028.
In the meantime, get ready, because based on what we’ve already seen, there are going to be some very interesting things, possibly of questionable legality, coming out of the White House these next four years.