COMMENTARY:
What amazes me is the sheer number of things the record clearly confirms Mr. Trump has done which would have been unthinkable in any other president.
Imagine Obama making himself chair of the appropriate committee and slapping the name “Obama-Kennedy Center” on that building. Or demolishing half the White House for a huge ballroom, undoubtedly ornate and tasteless, at great cost.
Inspectors-General in federal departments, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Senate Parliamentarian are all independent for important reasons. Congress created inspectors-general to watch administrative departments for corruption, illegality, and waste, and required presidents who fire them to report reasons to Congress. Trump has fired dozens, Obama none.
The Fed exists so independent savvy financial people can make the best financial decisions for our nation, rather than whatever is most convenient politically for passing presidents. Imagine Biden pressuring the bank and starting spurious criminal investigations to extort the Bank to act imprudently to reduce inflation before the 2024 election.
The neutral Senate Parliamentarian, an impartial internal referee and rules expert, advises the Senate on what’s lawful. That neutral advice is so important to the Senate’s functioning that the posterior-osculating Republican senators have actually resisted Trump’s demand to fire her, when they resist little else.
Imagine Obama appointing Montel Williams as defense secretary because he’d served in the Navy and Marine Corps.
Imagine Joe Biden sending Hunter to negotiate a Middle East peace agreement while Hunter’s capital investment firm was receiving huge investments from Saudi Arabia. Imagine him making Michael Cohen Attorney-General because he liked Cohen’s testimony against Donald Trump.
Forget the numerous people 47 has had our government try [and fail ludicrously] to jail for doing their jobs or speaking up against the Great Leader. Obviously these discourage dissent. They also waste judicial and legal resources, including wasted of precious dollars when we can’t guarantee folks health and Trump threatens to destroy Social Security.
When did Presidential pardons become a personal profit center? Presidents 43, 44, 45, and 46 pardoned 80 to 212 convicted criminals each. Number 47, in one year, has pardoned 1700 – close to 200 individually, usually with a healthy political donation from the convict’s family, PLUS about 1500 in the mass pardon of the nice folks who attacked cops and defaced Congress, threatening to hang the vice-president, for love of Trump.
President Biden didn’t try to jail David Weiss for investigating his son, or appoint as AG Michael Cohen because he liked that lawyer’s testimony about Trump.
And suppose Obama had removed all reference to the Declaration of Independence from a museum honoring a slave-holding signatory? We’d howl, because both his patriotism and his slave-holding are historically important facts. Like each of us, our historical leaders were inherently imperfect and self-contradictory human beings.
Suppose Obama appointed as HHS Secretary a man with no medical training or health management or administrative leadership experience, and watched quietly while measles and other “extinct” diseases reawakened and spread. Almost all Defense Secretaries have deep experience running large defense institutions or national-security bureaucracies. Pete Hegseth has run nothing except his mouth.
Trump-defenders excused his many personal and political bad acts by saying he’d keep our finances in order and avoid unnecessary foreign wars. Polls show few now trust him fiscally, and an unnecessary and inflationary foreign war is spending vast fortunes and Iranian civilian lives to get us back to where we were under the agreement Mr. Obama had negotiated without war.
Peter Goodman's opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of KRWG Public Media or NMSU.