Aside from the obvious, his actual performance was just terrible. Here a just a couple of data points I ran across this morning:
I guess when people say they liked his policies, they meant his policies to deny people health insurance.
How about this one?
Or how about Trump’s claim that his tax cuts were the largest in history. (“nobody’s ever seen anything like it!”)
How about Trump’s new crusade against Joe Biden in which he claims that nobody died on his watch? He lied, of course:
65 military personnel died in war zones during Trump’s administration.
It’s common for some gold star families to blame the administration in charge for the deaths of their loved ones. Weirdly, since Benghazi it only seems to be right wing gold star families blaming Democrats. I didn’t see much of this during Trump’s tenure. Maybe all the families of the fallen were Trump fans? Or, more likely, the non-Trump fan families weren’t interested in becoming part of a political campaign.
Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly has more on this:
Trump is betting that he can make inroads on the anti-war left, with the help of Kennedy and Gabbard, by portraying himself a peacemaker battling warmongers Biden and Harris.
Evidence for that charge is also scant. If Biden and Harris have so deeply embroiled America in endless war, how is it that fewer American soldiers have died in combat during their administration than in Trump’s? How is it that fewer soldiers have died in combat than in any administration since Jimmy Carter?
According to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks annual casualty data, 65 soldiers died in “hostile action” during the four years of the Trump administration, versus 13 under Biden through 2022, the last year tabulated. The Washington Monthly’s Zach Marcus reviewed combat-related deaths announced in Pentagon press releases over the previous two years and identified three additional hostile action deaths, for a total of 16. That’s a 75 percent decline.
You are likely familiar with the incidents that caused the 16 deaths, as there are only two: the August 2021 suicide bombing at an Afghanistan airport and the January 2024 drone attack on an American military base in Jordan, for which the loose-knit Iranian-backed militia Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility.
The reason why the Biden-Harris administration has suffered so few hostile action deaths is because it ended the so-called “forever war” in Afghanistan. Most of the deaths were a tragic consequence of leaving that combat zone, not from deepening any foreign conflict.
In leaving Afghanistan just short of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Biden and Harris closed the book on the failed neoconservative project of exploiting that traumatic event to expand American hegemony across the Greater Middle East with American ground troops.
How exactly are we on the verge of World War III? In Trump’s narrative, it’s because of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars.
Trump places heavy emphasis on the Afghan bombing deaths to argue Biden and Harris are so incompetent that they facilitated fresh conflicts. He told the National Guard conference, “It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the October 7 attack on Israel. Because it gave us lack of respect.”
This tenuous, self-serving argument collapses upon minimal scrutiny.
Read on. It’s a good analysis.
Trump’s only national security and foreign policy is to blather about money, “make friends” with despots who see him coming a mile away, tariffs as a “negotiating” posture that doesn’t work and doing the opposite of whatever his predecessors did. He is an imbecile in most ways but in this way in particular.