Alexander Grigoriy Muradyan Business Manager (2019–present) Oct 19
This is in response to a person who insulted me on Quora. Even though you have no respect for me, I have respect for you and I will not disclose your name. You claim that Trump is the best thing to happen to America and that he is the best president in history. You claim that the fact that he is “pro-life” (even though he isn’t) makes him a great president. You also think that that is an important factor in whether a president counts as a good one. I will tell you now why you are 200,000% WRONG. Here goes nothing (and I even included REAL statistics, which you Trumpists never do, you just rant about how you aren’t stupid and you support him because he is ‘fOr ThE pEoPlE’). I will show you the REAL truth about “President” Donald tRump.
Trump has been horrible as president. He slowed down the Obama economy which he inherited with his pointless and costly trade wars. And, yes, the catastrophic coronavirus response was 100% his fault. Most people do not consider abortion to be murder, but you could actually build a strong legal case for charging Trump with negligent homicide for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died as a direct result of his mishandling of the pandemic.
The metrics that the Sienna College poll of 2018 used to evaluate presidents included the following: background, imagination, integrity, intelligence, luck, willingness to take risks, ability to compromise, executive ability, leadership ability, communication ability, overall ability, party leadership, relations with Congress, (quality of) court appointments, handling of the economy, executive appointments, domestic accomplishments, foreign policy accomplishments, avoiding crucial mistakes, and experts’ view
A presidents’ stance on a single political issue like abortion was not considered as part of the evaluation… and… your position that it should, I hope you would understand, is extremely biased. The majority of people in the world and the country disagree with you on this point, but you’re using a presidents’ agreement or disagreement with your minority point of view as a basis for evaluating if they are a good president or not?
Anyway, out of all of those metrics, when evaluated by historians of every political persuasion, Trump was ranked 40th-44th in every single one of them except for three. Which three?
Well, in terms of handling the economy he was ranked 39th. Still firmly in the bottom quartile of all presidents, but at least he was higher than Herbert Hoover. Still, his misuse of tariffs which it is clear he doesn’t even understand how they work has done tremendous damage to the economy and he’s done very little to improve it.
As far as a willingness to take risks, Trump was ranked 25th. So around the middle of the pack. He definitely can be bold in the actions he takes, that’s true. But while you might chalk that up to strength, determination, or a bold vision… I would attribute it more to stupidity, ignorance, stubbornness, vanity, and a complete disinterest in listening to the experts around him or even reading his security briefings. So yeah, some of the things he has done have been rather bold, as a British person would say.
And, the one category where he got ranked the highest? Luck. He was ranked the 10th luckiest president in history. And I can’t really argue with that. He inherited arguably the strongest economy and the longest period of uninterrupted jobs growth in US history from his predecessor, and then he had no major domestic or international crises to deal with during his first 3 years in office, in spite of his mighty efforts to create one.
When such a crisis finally did come along – the COVID-19 global pandemic – his mishandling of it was of truly epic and legendary proportions. I mean it could not have possibly been any worse. He politicized the wearing of masks. He politicized belief in the virus. He sidelined the nation’s top contagious disease experts in favor of unqualified yes-men who wanted us to try herd immunity. He diverted valuable resources away from places that needed them based on political grudges. He actively encouraged people to ignore his own White House’s recommendations for how to deal with the virus. And he continued on a course to try and destroy the ACA while he had zero plans for anything to replace it. Any idiot could have just stepped aside, let Dr. Fauci give good advice, told the American people to listen to the experts, and taken appropriate precautions… and he would have saved 150,000 lives and coasted to reelection victory easily. But Trump is a sub-idiot. He’s on a whole other level.
In terms of executive appointments, intelligence, integrity, and overall ability, Trump was ranked 44th. Dead last. And this is an average of rankings by historians that INCLUDE those that self-identify as conservative or Republican. And I have to say, I agree 100% and think that this could not be any more evident.
In terms of executive appointments, they have been a disaster and a joke from day 1. The man was appointed as Secretary of State, the chief diplomat of our nation, a former Exxon CEO. He replaced the sitting secretary of energy, a nuclear physicist, with Rick f’ing Perry who didn’t even know what the department was for. He made Betsy DeVos, a woman with zero background in education and a massive conflict of interest as she runs a company that collects on student loans, the secretary of education, obviously because she was a big campaign donor. He made Scott Pruit head of the EPA – what was his qualification? Well, he had sued the EPA a record number of times in Oklahoma.
I could go on. And on and on and on. Trump ran on “draining the swamp” but he ushered in the swampiest swamp in the history of swamps. His entire cabinet and administration were full of political hacks, lobbyists, cronies, and campaign donors who were massively and openly corrupt. And I haven’t even mentioned the ridiculous amount of nepotism in his administration or the fact that hundreds of vital government positions remained vacant for years because he was so totally inept and underprepared and didn’t even have a real transition team after he fired Chris Christie. Trumpists like to give Trump credit for a deal that was brokered between North and South Korea – we didn’t even have an ambassador to South Korea until 2018! This level of complete ineptitude is unparalleled in all of US history.
I’m tired of talking about this so, in brief:
integrity: yep. Trump has zero integrity. He cares about literally nothing other than himself and is openly corrupt and criminal.
intelligence: hands down. Dumbest president in the history of the United States. He speaks with a 4th-grade vocabulary, as determined by an unbiased analysis of his speeches developed for the US military. People who are classified as mentally retarded often learn to communicate at up to a 6th-grade level.
overall ability: yes. Goes without saying. It would actually be better if we had a vacant presidency. He actively harms the country with everything he does even in the rare instances where he is trying to do something good (even though he only cares about himself, he does on occasion try to do something that will benefit others – if only to help himself politically – but he inevitably fails)
So yeah, anyway. He’s objectively a horrible president, and very likely the worst the country has ever seen. His executive orders are crap, they have no legal weight behind them just red meat thrown to his supporters. And minority discrimination is not = to religious freedom.
Finally, I would say that even as a conservative or a Christian Trump has utterly failed. So… even from a pro-Republican, pro-Conservative, pro-Christian biased perspective, abandoning objectivity and viewing Trump through this lens, he has been a horrible president.
What conservative values has he embraced? Conservatives used to be all about fiscal responsibility. But Trump has EXPLODED the national deficit and debt. Under Obama, the deficit shrank every year. Trump blew it up. And he managed to do this when the economy was BOOMING. Something that no president has EVER done before. We’ve increased the deficit in debt during depressions, recessions, and global wars… but never during an economic boom in peacetime. Yet Trump did it.
Conservatives also used to be very much against tariffs and for free trade. And I agreed with them. What happened? Tariffs and protectionism are bad for the economy and bad for capitalism. Trump has been the most tariff-happy president in US history.
Conservatives used to be for preserving and protecting the environment (though, admittedly, they turned on this principle before Trump as their corporate donors influenced them more and more). Richard Nixon started the EPA, after all. But Trump appointed to head the EPA a guy who only wants to destroy it. And he took us out of the Paris climate accords for no reason other than because Obama did it. Out of spite. He doesn’t even understand what climate change is. He’s too stupid and ignorant. He thinks it’s about clean air and water… that has nothing to do with it. The guy is on record saying that the sound from windmills causes cancer. Because he is still pissed off about a windmill farm being built off the coast of one of his failing golf courses years ago. Ugh.
Trump is pro-torture. Pro-destroying-families (as long as they’re immigrant families). Pro-Russia. Pro-North Korea. Pro-dictator. He’s an aspiring fascist. He is not a Conservative.
and from the Christian angle… the man has obviously never opened the Bible in his entire life. He thinks that Christians are idiots and mocks them in private all the time. He lies about his own faith to manipulate them into voting for him. He brags about serial sexual assault. He has multiple credible accusations of rape against him. He committed multiple felonies to try and silence the porn stars he banged when he was cheating on his pregnant wife. He’s twice divorced. Good friends with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and sent well wishes to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. He gassed peaceful protestors for a cynical photo-op of him holding a Bible upside down next to a church. He signed off on the remote murder of an Iranian politician on foreign soil. He is a narcissist. Spiteful. Vindictive. Gluttonous. Slothful. Foul-mouthed. Wrathful. Unforgiving… he said at the national prayer breakfast one year that Jesus was wrong about the whole forgiveness thing.
and, even though many Christians are pro-Choice so I’m not sure that this qualifies as anti-Christian, but Trump was also pro-Choice his entire life up until he decided it would be easier to run for office as a Republican than a Democrat. He does not care about abortion or unborn children. Give me a break. He doesn’t even care about his own living children. He willfully implemented an unimaginably cruel policy of family separation at the border, tearing infant children away from their parents, causing irreparable harm to these children and their families. He signed off on this. Does that sound Christian to you? THIS is your guy? Really? Really???
My most devout and god-fearing friends recognize Trump for the total fraud, hypocrite, and moral monster that he is. And I’m glad about that. I used to be devoutly Christian myself, and even though I’m not anymore, I’d like to think that if I still were I would not be so blinded by politics that I couldn’t recognize Trump …
Obama is someone who gives out billions to enemies of America? You mean like Trump doing everything in his power to remove sanctions against Russia, by far America’s #1 enemy in the world, allowing them to keep their annexation of Crimea, allowing, nay inviting, them to meddle in the US and other international elections with impunity, freeing up the money of Russian oligarchs which had been frozen in international banks, rolling over and allowing them to gain a foothold in the Middle East free of charge, doing everything he can to help dismantle or render obsolete NATO? The work Trump has done on behalf of Russia is probably worth trillions, not billions, and all of it has been at the expense of common Americans. And that’s not to say anything of what he did for North Korea, the Islamists in Turkey, the hardliners in Iran, protectionists in China, or those against human rights in the Philippines.
Someone who causes wars? You mean like murdering top-ranking international officials at the airport on neutral soil? That sort of thing?
Countless American lives lost due to incompetence and disdain for the common American? Are you watching the news lately? This is actually pretty funny coming in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and yeah it’s not my opinion but I do concur with virtually every scholar in the world when they rate Trump as the worst or among the worst of all American presidents, and Obama as significantly better. This is not even a controversial opinion amongst those who study this sort of thing. It’s virtually impossible to believe that Trump is anything other than the single worst president in US history unless you live inside the Fox News bubble. Hundreds of nationally prominent Republicans (present or former), conservatives, and independents including multiple former GOP presidents and nominees for presidents would back me up on this.
Trump’s vocabulary is at a 4th grade level. Mentally retarded people can often function at up to a 5th or 6th grade level. Also, he has threatened lawsuits against all of his past schools if they ever revealed his transcripts. Do you think he did that because his grades were good?
And you also claim that Trump has had “highs and lows” in his presidency. He had no highs. EVER. He has been an embarrassment on the world stage since day 1 of his presidency. He has one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.
Trump did not have ups and downs. He just didn’t. This is false. He never had an up in his entire administration. His approval rating never went above 50% (rolling aggregate through 4 years). Not once. There is not a single US president in history since we started tacking approval who achieved this feat. And most presidents who faced some serious crisis like the COVID pandemic were able to get a huge bump from this, rallying the country around unified support for a coherent strategy to save American lives or beat back a common foe. George W Bush, for instance, not generally regarded as a good president, had 90% approval after 9/11.
George HW Bush topped out at 89% after winning the Gulf War. Kennedy rose to 83% after making gains toward nuclear disarmament during the Cold War. Truman earned 87% approval after the dissolution of Nazi Germany. And each of these presidents had lows, too. Truman’s approval rating bottomed out at 22%. Bush Sr.’s at 29. Bush Jr.’s at 25. Kennedy’s at 56. These presidents had highs and lows. Trump never had a high. His entire administration was a disaster from start to finish and he will go down as the worst president in US history without question or controversy.
Re: Obama’s “care”… I don’t even know what you are trying to say. Are you saying that The Affordable Care Act is paid for by taxpayers? Uh… well yeah. sort of. Duh. Though the program also collects large amounts of insurance premiums that enrollees pay, so, it’s not all taxpayer-funded. Not like, say, the much more successful and popular programs Medicaid and Medicare.
Are you suggesting that the United States, the richest most powerful nation on Earth, can’t afford to provide healthcare for its citizens? Something that countries like Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Ghana, Colombia, Bhutan, India, China, Thailand, Greece, Israel, Japan, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and the former Soviet Union, among many others, all manage to do? That’s just sad and pathetic. But that aside, Obama didn’t write the ACA. It was written by members of Congress and lobbyists for the phrama and healthcare industries, basically an updated version of Republican Bob Dole’s healthcare plan from the 90s, and was more or less a big wet sloppy kiss to American insurance companies. It’s far from a perfect piece of legislation, but it’s better than what we had (basically nothing), and resulted in tens of millions of people getting healthcare coverage that they didn’t have before. Once signed into law, Republicans sued over and over to repeal the act, but they failed.
Ex-president Trump vowed to repeal and replace the ACA, and he promised that he had something big and great and wonderful that was going to come to replace it… but that legislation was famously always “two weeks away” and never actually materialized because it didn’t exist. Trump failed to keep his promise to repeal the ACA, even though his party had full control over the presidency, the Supreme Court, and both chambers of Congress for years, because in truth they didn’t really want to get rid of it they just used this as a way to rile up their base and to get the low-information simpletons who vote for them angry with lies about how expensive or socialist it was. But they were fibbing the whole time and they knew it. They had no plan to replace the ACA. They haven’t had any good legislative ideas since the 1970s. And so Republicans did nothing to get rid of the ACA once they were in power. They lied to you. What did they do?
Well they continued to underfund it and undermine it, make it more expensive and cover less, all for the advantage of their friends in the insurance industry who liked the provision that Americans had to buy insurance, but disliked other parts of the bill like the fact that they had to cover people in spite of pre-existing conditions, and that they couldn’t drop people for getting sick, and the parts that attempted to keep prices of insurance reasonable. So the GOP kept suing to get rid of these parts, and in some states even suing to get rid of the ACA completely even though they had literally no idea for how to replace it. Remember Trump bragging in 2016 about how it would be so easy? How he would make sure that everyone had insurance and healthcare coverage and how it would be cheaper and better and more extensive than Obamacare? All BS and hot air. Like everything he ever promises or says.
About Obama “littarly” (my spellcheck just took a handful of painkillers) snatching money out of people who do not do a thing… where to begin… Obama isn’t doing anything, he’s retired. The ACA was passed by Congress. It is a legal and Constitutional collection of tax revenue that is largely self-funding through enrollee premiums, as determined by the GOP-controlled Supreme Court. Nobody is having money stolen from them. That’s not how taxes and government expenditures work. Do you get this worked up about the government stealing money from people to pay for things like public schools, highways, national defense, or air traffic control? If so maybe you should move to southern Somalia. It’s a libertarian paradise there. No taxes. No government. You’d be right at home. The rest of us would like a functioning government thanks.
by “people who are following the law’s hands” , I guess you mean the plutocrats and oligarchs and robber barons who often pay little or no tax, like Trump, who cheat and steal and evade and con their way into obscene levels of personal wealth, rarely giving anything back to the country that made possible their ludicrous lifestyle, whom most Democrats especially ones like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would advocate taxing at higher more equitable rates in order to pay for things that would benefit everyone, such as universal healthcare, free college tuition, infrastructure and medical research and stuff like that? Those are the people that you want to stick up for? You know that they don’t give two rat turds about you, right? They spend money, tons of it, to convince you to go to bat for them. But they don’t care if you get sick and die.
By “people who do not do a thing and ‘our’ just collecting money”… are you talking about poor people? The unemployed? The disabled? Hardworking immigrants, who came to the country to make a better life for themselves, work 3 jobs, and pay more taxes than Trump ever has in his life?
Well… fret not. Most of those people wouldn’t qualify for coverage under the ACA. Many of them would qualify for other programs such as Medicaid and Medicare Disability. But… Obama had nothing to do with those programs they existed long before he came into office and even though many Republicans privately would like to get rid of them or cut funding, most won’t admit to this publicly as they are enormously popular and successful. The ACA is more aimed at people who work hard but don’t have the sort of good privileged jobs that provide health insurance, but they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, and so they end up in this awful limbo area in between where…
… they can’t afford private insurance as it is so ridiculously expensive in this country or because they had a pre-existing condition or a chronic illness, and they were working too hard and thus too “wealthy” (read: not abjectly poor) to get Medicaid, and not yet old enough to get Medicare, and so they just end up slipping through the cracks ending up uninsured or underinsured, and are often one big injury or illness away from being bankrupt, destitute, homeless, and/or dead, and a drain on society (though not as big of a drain as the fat cat CEOs that you are advocating for). Do you want to take away these people’s insurance? Why? Do you realize that they pay taxes just like anyone else (who isn’t as privileged and/or corrupt as Trump)? And at the same time, they are spending anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars out of pocket to pay for their own healthcare on top of this?
yeah… those are the people that Trump and his allies were attempting to take health insurance away from. People who in many cases had recently lost their jobs or been furloughed. During a once a century global pandemic that Trump did everything in his power to make worse. Really considerate of you and your dear leader. But I guess if the CEO of Aetna gets a 0.1% increase in his multi-million dollar bonus this year, it’ll all be worth it.
My boredom has dissipated. Going to make the rest of this quick. Trump didn’t build crap. He stole billions of dollars from more worthwhile projects, illegally, and managed to get 300 km of “barrier” constructed, not a proper wall. and FYI that’s about 10% of the length of the border. Not very impressive. Trump did ban people from coming into the country from several countries outright (including legal residents at least at first and in some cases). And this was stupid and heartless and made no sense.
Though the “Muslim ban” had nothing to do with immigration, Trump was proudly, openly, cruelly anti-immigrant. Which sucked. Immigrants make the country and its economy very much stronger, more robust, and more vibrant. Many studies have proven as much. Many GOP officials in border states would say the same. And large-scale deportations have destroyed many communities in those places, both for the immigrant families ripped apart and for the Americans left behind in the communities that suddenly find their economies and industries gutted. Creating a job isn’t stealing a job. I don’t see you out in any fields picking berries from sun up to sundown. And, guess what? My ancestors were very likely here before yours if you are even American. Unless you are Inuit and that’s why your name is Nanook and you barely speak English. In that case, well, I guess maybe you’ve got some room to complain about immigration. but Trump still sucks.
See him for the monster that he is, on Christian principles, and even human principles. Back in high school when I was still practicing and devout I did have a lot more Republican sympathies… and a lot of that had to do with the abortion issue… but I was always politically unaffiliated and tried to keep an open mind and if I saw any politician being a hypocrite, Democrat or Republican, like Newt Gingrich, or Bill Clinton, I would call them out for it. But Trump is the most a-moral un-Christian person to occupy the White House in US history. He can’t understand devotion because the only thing he is devoted to is himself. In my opinion, any good Christian would never, ever, ever vote for or support this man. Nor would any true Conservative. Or any true Republican. Or any true American for that matter, as he has repeatedly sold out the country to foreign enemies for his own purposes and financial gain. The man is terrible in every way imaginable.
So support this anti-Christian “president” if you want to. See how far it gets you. I also never said that all Trumpists were racist, so I don’t know why you claim I did. I merely said Trumpists are one of a few, maybe more than one:
- Racist
- Ignorant
- Confused
- Neo-Nazis
- Evil plutocrats
- Russian Despots
- Stupid
And as sorry as you may seem to admit it, you are all seven. Get out of my face, and this goes for anyone who is going to leave a comment under this trying to dissipate my standpoints (which I guarantee won’t be backed up with evidence and statistics like mine is, this is what I experience with all Trumpanzees). The idiocy of some people amazes me.
And a side note, when will you learn that insults and cursing do NOT make your point more valid? Since you seem not to learn anything, try swearing in caps lock next time. It might make you look better. Or worse. You can’t get much worse from here.
