The NY Times Tom Edsall published a column this week (gift link)called ‘Easily the Worst President in U.S. History.’ You know who he’s talking about.
He leads with this:
The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp. It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.
One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News:
We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.
Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.
Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.
“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”
There are thousands of stories like that out there, most of which we will never hear about. But that’s just the introduction to Edsall’s list of grotesque failures, corruption, incompetence and malevolence. A few short excerpts:
“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”
The numbers are mind-boggling. The other day a whistleblower said that when the DOGE boys finally asked for a briefing on what USAID actually did (after they’d already cut it) they were surprised because they’d understand that is was just a ‘woke” slush fund. Oh well. Too bad.
There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty. In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”
Oops.
It doesn’t stop there. America can thank the president for environmental deregulation that could sicken and kill people by the tens or even hundreds of thousands.
And the hastening of climate change could eventually kill billions of people on this planet. They don’t care. Trump said, “we’re going back to fossil fuel, we have to be smart.”
Oh and he’s also on track to completely cripple the medical research sector of the United States:
At the same time, the administration has been canceling funding for lifesaving scientific and medical research. In November, JAMA Internal Medicine published “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health.”
It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”
It goes on and on and it’s particularly useful since Edsall’s columns are usually just he said/she said accounts by various experts on a certain topic. This is just a long and detailed list of the horrors the Trump administration is inflicting on the American people.
Read the whole thing and keep it bookmarked. I’m sure we could add new examples every day for the next 3 years. It will certainly help to have a Congress as a backstop and the courts will be able to stop some of this at least temporarily. But Trump will still be president until January 2029 and he can continue to do immense damage all by himself.