The farewell party.

With the inauguration of Joe Biden as president the tumultuous Trump years have come to an end.

As a book reviewer I can testify to the truly awesome amount of ink that has been spilled trying to describe, explain, and understand the last four years. And over the course of the next year I’m sure much more will be added to the pile, including post mortems on the 2020 election, the COVID-19 debacle, and the final, fiery attack on the Capitol by an angry mob. I look forward to what will be said.

What kind of a snap judgment can be made now, however? Many are debating whether Trump will be considered the worst president in U.S. history. The prior point, arrived at more easily, is that he was the worst person to ever be president (including the slaveholders, per David Frum). To this I would agree. There has simply never been someone so mendacious and corrupt, or as lazy, ignorant, and vicious to hold the office. Defenders may point to such generic accomplishments as tax “reform” and flooding the judiciary with “conservative” judges — developments bound to happen under any Republican administration, and with which Trump seems to have been uninvolved. Trump’s own interests in being president were restricted to obsessively following his own media coverage, grift, and using the shield of the office to keep himself out of jail.

In a way, America was lucky he was such an incompetent buffoon. Someone with all of Trump’s bad qualities, matched with intelligence and charm, might have signaled the end of the American experiment in government. One hopes, without much confidence, that something will have been learned, just as lessons will be taken from the COVID disaster, which we were lucky was not even more deadly. How many such bullets can be dodged?

One discouraging conclusion to draw from the Trump years is that institutions will not preserve any part of the existing order. The center did not hold for four years in the U.S., with the Republican party caving completely to Trump and his manifold outrages during that time. Peace, order, and good government (those Canadian virtues) are hanging on everywhere by a slender thread.

Will Trump be back? I doubt it, given his age, health, and the miserable note his presidency ended on. But stranger things have happened. Of greater concern is the fact that Trump was just a symptom, or at most a catalyzing agent, of a deeper rot. And the conditions that gave rise to him are not going away. In fact, they are almost certainly going to get worse. The anger and hate that Trump both stoked and embodied is the product of various trends — political polarization, growing inequality, social media — that I can’t see getting better anytime soon. Trump may be on his way, but someone else is bound to come along who will harness that anger. This is not the end, but the beginning.

Today, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak, my hometown and province is entering its second emergency lockdown.

I don’t see how the response to the pandemic in this country can be seen as anything less than a chaotic disaster (to borrow the language former president Obama used to describe the Trump administration’s response in the U.S.). We are in a much worse situation than we were when all this started. A year’s worth of sacrifice has been wasted.

The medical response hasn’t been bad. Vaccines were developed faster than most experts thought likely. The vaccine rollout hasn’t been very impressive thus far, but I’m hoping we can get up to speed soon. Reports that some snowbirds were flying to their winter homes in Florida just to get vaccinated are damning if true.

The political and economic response, however, has been catastrophic, and will only lead to even worse results before things start getting better. The bill to pay from all of this, as I’ve previously warned, is going to be huge.

We need to look ahead. Experts have been warning of pandemics for decades. We should consider ourselves lucky that COVID-19, for all the people it has killed, is not itself a particularly deadly disease. The survival rate is very high. That can’t be counted on next time. And there will be a next time. We need to learn from the mistakes that have been made.

We might begin with studying why some countries have been so successful in dealing with COVID-19 where others have failed so completely. Why were we unable to implement effective measures to test, track, and trace? Is there something about neoliberal attitudes toward government that has frustrated our taking effective action? Lessons must be learned.

From  “Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy” by Robert Reich:

Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken window is thereby an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows.

The message: do whatever you want here because others have done it and got away with it.

The broken window theory has led to picayune and arbitrary law enforcement in poor communities. But America’s most privileged and powerful have been breaking big windows with impunity.

In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet not no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.

In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the Sackler family, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.

Here, too, they’ve got away with it. These windows remain broken.

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.

The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people”, and make money off his presidency.

And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.

A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him.

Trump’s recent pardons have broken double-pane windows.

Not only has he shattered the norm for presidential pardons – usually granted because of a petitioner’s good conduct after conviction and service of sentence – but he’s pardoned people who themselves shattered windows. By pardoning them, he has rendered them unaccountable for their acts.

They include aides convicted of lying to the FBI and threatening potential witnesses in order to protect him; his son-in-law’s father, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, illegal campaign contributions, and lying to the Federal Election Commission; Blackwater security guards convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians, including women and children; Border Patrol agents convicted of assaulting or shooting unarmed suspects; and Republican lawmakers and their aides found guilty of fraud, obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations.

It’s not simply the size of the broken window that undermines standards, according to Wilson and Kelling. It’s the willingness of society to look the other way. If no one is held accountable, norms collapse.

See here for Unaccountable, and here for Unaccountable, Part two.