The Hall of Shame of the Trump era

The Trump presidency has been defined by many things, of course, and, in the final 30 days of his administration, they combine for a considerable catalog:

In no particular order, in a sort of hall of shame, they include willfully downplaying the pandemic, maintaining a seemingly lackadaisical attitude about it, and exhibiting an aversion to follow common safety precautions while in public; misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories, and false and misleading claims (well more than 23,000 at last count); getting cozy with several dictators and authoritarian leaders across the world; packing the lower federal courts and naming three justices to the Supreme Court with conservative credentials; an aversion to holding Russia to account for a series of questionable actions by the Putin regime; crude remarks about women; immigrant bashing; tax cuts that largely benefited him, the super rich and corporations that don’t need relief; a fraud lawsuit against Trump University settled in 2018 for $25 million; casting doubt on the integrity of U.S. intelligence and federal investigative services; pressuring the Ukraine leadership to discredit former Vice President (and now president-elect) Joe Biden; provocative rhetoric at rallies and in offhand tweets; senior advisers involved in scandals that led to convictions and incarceration; a damaging trade war with China and tariffs that prompted tariffs against U.S. products by European allies.

And, like the excitable TV pitchman says on myriad ads about some $19.95 kitchen product no one really needs, “Wait, there’s more!”:

Family separations at border detention centers, and in some cases the authorities do not know where the parents are; withdrawals from the Iran nuclear accords and the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change; meddling with the Department of Justice’s mission; attempts to derail the Mueller probe into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential campaign; his impeachment by the House and acquittal in the Senate; accusations of racist attitudes and implied support for white supremacist organizations such as the Proud Boys; evidence unearthed by national media that the president has paid little or no federal taxes in the past decade; efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from the once-a- decade census (the Supreme Court on Friday decided not to rule on the case for the time being); and golf, golf and more golf, even as the pandemic surges anew.

To be fair, El Presidente has done some good things, but, darn, they largely escape me right now as I recall the line from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”: “The evil that men do lives after them/The good is oft interred with their bones.”

But one salient aspect of the former reality TV show host-turned-president’s legacy has been a through line in his presidency: Claims about illegal voting, beginning after he won the 2016 election but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by some 3 million votes, and shortly afterward nurtured a belief that many of them were cast by illegal aliens, more or less pointing a finger at California, which, of course, has a growing and significant Latinx population that is increasingly helping to influence the direction of the Golden State, the nation’s most populous, with nearly 40 million people.

And his claims about illegal votes, voter fraud and efforts to subvert the outcome of the Nov. 3 election, the Electoral College certification — and the pending Jan. 6 congressional session to affirm the College’s vote — continue to this day.

Recently, in a tweet, he claimed a 68 percent error rate in Michigan voting machines. He has claimed vote rigging and ballot dumps in rivers and creeks in Wisconsin without evidence; and, of course, the interminable lawsuits, led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, in battleground states.

And this week El Presidente praised Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who said he is not ruling out joining a House member to object to the election results. And that House member is Rep. Mo Brooks, RAla

Why is it no surprise that the latest effort to subvert the 2020 election comes from the Yellowhammer State?

After all, the main recent 15th Amendment case came in 2013, a case out of Shelby County, Ala. (Shelby County v. Holder), that sought to modify the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 by seeking to do away with the need for jurisdictions with long histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval before changing voting rules.

The high court ruled in favor of Shelby County, and Alabama immediately green-lighted laws to restrict the voting population, requiring a photo ID to vote but then closed driver’s license offices, where the licenses can be obtained, in counties with the highest percentage of Blacks.

But in affirming principles of federalism, according to Eric Foner, a pre-eminent Civil War scholar and an expert in the Reconstruction era, conservative jurists, when they discuss the original federal system, “almost always concentrate on the ideas of eighteenth- century framers, ignoring those of the architects of Reconstruction,” which corrected omissions in our foundational documents and gave rise to America’s second founding.

Thinking of good things Trump did, I renall the line from “Julius Ceasar”: The evil that men do lives after them/The good is oft interred with their mones.”