When Faced With the Challenge of Donald Trump, Nearly Everyone Failed

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It is a truism of life that you never really know what you really have, whether it is in love, friendship, sports, career, or politics, until it is severely tested. The same can be said of our entire system of governance which was built to withstand all sorts of challenges, but had never faced one like that which has been presented over the last five years by Donald Trump.

On this, the last day of his unforgettable — and yet also largely forgettable — presidency, here is a look at how the major players in our now failing nation fared when it came to dealing with the Trump problem.

Conservative Media

After selling out almost immediately to Trump during the 2016 primaries (first as a ratings-driven lark, then for real), the vast majority of the conservative media humiliated itself forever by going all in for him, even to the bitter end. Even after he clearly lost his reelection bid, most of the conservative media at least pretended that the election results were not legitimate (out of fear of upsetting Trump’s cult), and most were still hesitant to criticize him strongly even after the absurd “rigged election” lie ended up helping to facilitate the assault on the Capitol.

As Trump leaves office, the conservative media which enabled his presidency is now more politically isolated and discredited in the minds of non-partisans than ever before. They have now been reduced to nothing more than preaching to a shrinking choir, all in a transparent attempt to keep their gigs amidst a struggling economy, and a badly broken business model.

Liberal Media

After having their pom-poms out for the nine years of the Barack Obama era, the liberal media (which is now defined as just about every outlet which is not openly “conservative”) suddenly became rabid pit bulls the moment that Trump — whom they had also enabled for ratings during the 2016 primaries — became president, and never let up. While Trump gave them plenty of legitimate ammunition with which to attack him, the mainstream news media overplayed their hand on numerous occasions, most notably the Russian election interference investigation (which was bad, but not as horrendous as the media had hyped), and the pandemic where they irrationally accused Trump of effectively facilitating the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans because of a virus endured relatively equally around the Western World.

This portion of the media has now lost ALL credibility with Republicans for at least the rest of their lifetimes. They are now stuck with a comparatively boring Biden presidency where they are forced to bring out their pom-poms again, all while they come off of the crack-like drug high of five years of unprecedentedly exciting (both real and imagined) Trump-related news content.

Never Trump Republicans

What began (I know, because I was there) as a principled stand against a Trump-led coup within the Republican Party and the elimination of conservatism as its guiding force, quickly dissolved into something almost as pathetic as Trumpism itself. Those “Never Trumpers” who didn’t sell out once they realized there was zero market for anti-Trump conservatives, eventually prostituted themselves to the left-wing forces of MSNBC, CNN, and Twitter, essentially becoming (especially once the Covid lockdowns hit) a grotesque minstrel show for their new woke-media masters, put on display for their audiences to witness the alleged moral superiority of liberalism.

Elected Republicans

The number of nationally-elected Republicans who can still hold their heads high today is barely greater than the number of times Trump was impeached. Only senators Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and Congressman Justin Amash fully passed the test (not coincidently, only one of them is still in office, for now).

Special levels of shame should be reserved for those who ran against Trump in 2016 (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Lindsay Graham), were personally humiliated by him, and then still kissed his ass for four straight years, only to then lose their treasured majority status, purely thanks to selfish insanity of the same conman they once warned us about. The GOP is now in a Catch-22 where their long-term minority status is virtually assured if they finally rid themselves of the Trump cancer, or if they do not.

Elected Democrats

They talked a good game for much of the Trump presidency, and were rewarded with a takeover of the House in 2018. But then, due largely to having created unrealistic expectations and losing their nerve, they botched the reaction to the Russia investigation, only to then immediately impeach Trump on far less serious allegations, with no significant Republican support.

Now, despite their own incompetence, they have been handed narrow control over all levers of the federal government and are perfectly positioned to get credit for eventually defeating a pandemic which they will have no direct role in ending. Their dream of turning America into an officially socialist nation is far closer now than it would have been if Bernie Sanders had been their presidential nominee.

Liberal/Academic/Scientific Establishment

Because they have reacted to the pandemic in ways which appear to most non-liberals to be totally nonsensical and overtly political (by dramatically flipping their position on masks and school closings, and largely exempting BLM protests/riots from restrictions/responsibility), they have lost enormous amounts of credibility with that portion of the population. Academics and doctors/scientists have now been forever lumped in with the liberal mainstream media as forces which are really just wolf-like political activists disguised as sheep-like non-partisan “experts.”
When it came to reacting to the often (though not always) “anti-science” Trump, “science” all too often reduced itself to his level.

Law Enforcement

James Comey, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, and Robert Mueller all had clear shots to potentially rid the country of the Trump cancer, and all of them missed miserably. Comey allowed his love of his own virtue to cause Hillary Clinton’s campaign to be needlessly crippled just before Trump’s upset win, Jeff Sessions rightly recused himself from the Russia investigation, but naively stood by as Trump was able to take him out in favor of Barr, who then sabotaged the easily blindsided Mueller’s report after the former Superman of the liberal media had clearly lost his cape (and balls) somewhere along a journey for which he was simply too old.

The Cabinet

While most Trump cabinet officers were always going to be his sycophants, four men, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, and John Bolton were in the best positions to expose the dangers of his presidency in a meaningful manner. While all four, in different ways, surely placated their consciences by their various forms of protest, all were ultimately ineffective and mostly feckless. None were the heroes the nation needed, and all should be made to feel some shame for that reality.

Judiciary

Thankfully, this was the element of our system which mostly passed the Trump test (which is ironic since this is the realm where his impact will be the greatest in the long-term), probably because they were never fully tried. Not one court bent in a significant way to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election-rigging, though, had the election actually been really close, we would have likely discovered cracks in that wall as well.

Voters

Americans (or at least the Electoral College) made a poor decision in 2016, at partly because they didn’t fully understand for what they were voting. While many voters learned their lesson in 2020, they may have once again voted for something very different from what they were expecting (the Biden Administration will end up being far more progressive than Obama’s was).

Trump

Trump himself failed this examination. One of his greatest weaknesses is his own massive ego combined with crushing levels of insecurity, which finally got the best of him when his pathological need to lie about having not lost the 2020 election caused his legacy, and his own post-presidential life, to be radically altered in a negative direction.

Above everything else, the core duties of a president are to protect our freedoms, our liberty, our equal opportunity, our national unity, and to not diminish the office itself. On every one of those counts, though some were not directly his fault, Trump failed catastrophically, and the nation may very well never fully recover.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.