Well, President Trump has officially been acquitted on both Articles of Impeachment by the Senate of the United States. He will continue to serve the remainder of his term and will be eligible to run in this year’s Presidential election. But even if the Democrats were unable to remove him from office, they still managed to impeach him. That is now historical record. He is only the third President of the United States to be impeached and will be the first to fight a full re-election campaign. Bill Clinton was in his second term and the 22nd Amendment would have made it impossible to run again. Andrew Johnson, after narrowly avoiding impeachment by one vote, was soundly defeated in the Democratic primaries and withdrew from the election. Trump will be looking to win a second term as an impeached president. This administration has seen a lot of very unusual situations in its three years. But that would be something truly unseen in American history before.
Of course, Trump’s re-election campaign has swung into full gear proclaiming complete vindication, that the Democrats would be sorry, that this was all political subterfuge to try and ruin him and his presidency and the many wonderful things it has accomplished. All it seems to have achieved to me is to stir up racial tensions to a new high not seen perhaps since the L.A riots of 1992. The great economic recovery he boasts of has nothing to do with whatever his fiscal policy even is. It’s because of policies and executive orders that his predecessor pushed through. The military interventions of this administration have only served to sow discord and heighten tensions in regions where tensions could really do with be calmed down. He pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which of course irritated world leaders, retweeted anti-Muslim videos from a far right British group, gotten way too friendly with autocratic dictators, cut relief aid to Puerto Rico and pressured the President of Ukraine to ‘do [him] a favour’ and open an investigation into one of his main political rivals, even seeming to withhold monetary and military aid to Ukraine unless they agreed to open the investigation.
That’s not to mention the fact that Trump has achieved almost none of his campaign promises. Obamacare hasn’t been repealed and replaced. The only proposed healthcare plan to replace it would have kicked over 20 million people off of their insurance over 10 years. That’s rather a long way from the promised universal coverage. His fabled wall has been mired in so much political wrangling, including a government shutdown and attempting to call a national emergency to get the funding for it, that it looks no closer to being a thing of reality than it seemed a coherent policy when he first proposed it. The only thing he has managed to do is pass a tax break for the extremely wealthy because that is one thing that Congress Republicans can get done.
Trump continues to self-aggrandize. He has done his entire adult life. And when he is the host of a reality TV show, that’s fine. He’s playing a character there. And making himself a living out of playing that character. That’s also fair enough. But, he’s not a great businessman or builder. Yes, he has made a lot of money, more than many of us will make in our lifetimes. He also received a multi-million-dollar inheritance from his father and has lost a huge amount of money as well. What he became before running for president was a man who would licence his name out, would put his name on a product, building or project without actually having too much to with making it.
But that behaviour is not acceptable for a politician. Especially one holding such an important office. The name calling on Twitter, the blatant attempts to side line any news outlet that doesn’t air favourable coverage of him, they all point to a man who is an extreme narcissist. Someone who must be the centre of attention at all times, no matter the reason.
Trump may claim that he has been totally exonerated and cleared. But if there was never any wrongdoing in the first place, why were they so keen to block witnesses from testifying? Surely the president’s defence team would be falling over themselves to have people speaking truthfully under oath, clearing his good name and revealing the whole process as the hoax it was. Instead they shut it down. Senate Republicans turned one of the major checks on a president into a complete sham, out of fear for their own futures. But whatever any future history textbook says about Donald Trump, it will start with the sentence ‘Donald Trump, the third President of the United States to be impeached…’ That is his place in history.
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