He did it his way but who’d want to clear up his mess?
Frank Sinatra’s classic My Way was ruined for me this week when the former president (makes me very happy to say ‘former’) Donald Trump left the White House for the final time as president. A perfectly-timed departure ceremony, organised by Trump himself (of course), saw him and his wife Melania board Air Force One for Florida where he saw out his final hours in office in West Palm Beach.
The 1968 ballad tells the story of a man who stubbornly lived life on his own terms and Trump’s artfully-staged farewell fuelled rumours he had planned his own departure to the last second with the aircraft taking off in time with the song that blared from speakers to a pro-Trump crowd of supporters. I’d say that’s a given, the man’s more imageobsessed than Kim Kardashian and that’s saying something.
I think they should have stripped him of his presidency and not let him serve out his term.
The part he played in the storming of Capitol Hill went beyond that of anyone who has an ounce of power let alone someone obsessed by it; someone who believes in his own self-enhanced hype and who could, if he had so desired, declared nuclear war in his final days in office. Nothing would have surprised me.
But yet I know people who still think he did a good job as the 45th president of the United States.
I’m not saying he didn’t do anything right, although I’m struggling to see how the legacy he leaves can be applauded in any way.
But when a president encourages a level of violence that led to people losing their lives and then, when pushed into a corner, condemns those people, I’d say he’ll go down as one of the worst presidents in American history; a president who looked after himself above his country, divided society not united it, caused more racial tension than there was when he started, encouraged people not to wear masks during a deadly global pandemic and basically left a storm to be cleared up in his wake.
Joe Biden has small shoes to fill and I think, I hope, he’ll do a far better job to mend such a fractured nation.