Alternative History

     Two weeks into the Trump era and depending on how a person chooses to look at things, it's been a pure debacle or its been an amazing spectacle of a politician actually doing the things he said he would do on the campaign trail. Its odd the amount of gnashing of teeth Trump has caused when you consider his actual moves are well within what any Republican president and most Democrats would do. A temporary travel/refugee ban on countries in a war zone has been a regular practice since at least 1979 and Obama himself did it in 2011 for longer than Trump will. The decision to apply it to legal, green card holding immigrants (if that was the intention, I've read conflicting things) and other people already approved to come to the U.S. is insanely cruel and certainly gives ammunition to people who just think it's racist. Aside from that element it's a perfectly mainstream order. The Supreme Court nomination, federal worker hiring freeze, regulation roll backs, threatening the UN and building a border fence are things that any Republican would claim to do. The border fence was actually approved back in 2007, I believe, it was just never funded.

     Its possible that any Republican would generate the same amount of anger from the left that Trump has, protesting being a liberals number one leisure time activity, but there is no way to know for sure. What the reaction has shown clearly though is that people have no sense of history beyond the currentness of their own lives and no sense of what role a President really has in the long term direction of the country.

     After all, when you look back on history, aren't almost all Presidents objectively failures or at best a non-entity in history? Lets examine!

     The first group of Presidents (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe) were important as Presidents but the bulk of their fame comes from their role in the founding of the nation. Their presidential activities often don't measure up to their revolutionary achievements.

     The second group (Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Filmore, Pierce, Buchanan) is mostly forgettable. The notable exception is Andrew Jackson, whose terms are fascinating in many ways but whether he was good or not depends on if a person thinks the Trail of Tears was an abomination of cruelty or if it was an act that saved thousands of Native Americans from getting slaughtered by militia type groups in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, etc. Plenty of support for both sides of that argument. Hard to argue 4,000 dead natives was a smashing success.

     Then we come to Lincoln. Winner all around

     Fourth group (Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, Cleveland again, McKinley) are all post Civil War reconstruction presidents and aside from Grant being seen as a war hero and poor James Garfield getting assassinated, none of them were much to read about.

     Then we get to Teddy Roosevelt. By popular acclaim he seems to be viewed as a good President  and while I think you could argue a strict examination of his policies would make him less popular today than he is, he did begin in some ways the progression from a civil war era nation into what we see today. He goes on the good list.

     Now we are getting to a modern age of Presidents. Group Five (Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) Taft was moderate but Wilson had overtly racist policies, was weak on WWI and was in charge for prohibition. Harding was caught up in bribery and affair scandals while generally being ineffective and died with a year left. Coolidge is well liked by Conservatives but dislike by Liberals and generally didn't make huge waves. Hoover supported prohibition and had shanties named after him. Three failures in this bunch.

     Now that we are in the very modern time, lets quickly categorize the rest:

FDR: While I personally find FDR destructive to the nation, he was successful in that he campaigned on a bunch of left wing stuff and successfully implemented it.
Truman: WW2, Marshall Plan, NATO. winner.
Eisenhower: even. nothing majorly good or bad. Korean war notwithstanding.
Kennedy: Died to soon to have a major accomplishment. Cuban Missile Crisis was partly his making.
Johnson: Failure. Vietnam and the war on poverty have been dismal and cancel out whatever good came from great society laws. Spied on MLK.
Nixon: Failure.
Ford. Even.
Carter: Failure
Reagan: Success, in the same way FDR was a success driving progressive liberalism, Reagan sparked a conservative resurgence.
Bush: even.
Clinton: even. Successful economy driven by a Republican Congress almost wiped out by sex scandals and the failures in Somalia and Rwanda.
Bush 2: Failure. Strong 9/11 response but having a Republican dominated Congress led to no noticeable conservative redirection of the government.
Obama: Failure: Obama gets a failing grade because so much of what he did that liberals love was implemented by executive order and have been wiped out in just a few days of a Trump presidency. FDR on the other hand was able to cement his leftist agenda in laws that have withstood the test of time. Obama is destined to go down in history like JFK, inspiring to millions but without much foot print legislatively.

    So what does it all mean? By my count we have 10 Presidents (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, FDR, Truman and Reagan) who can be considered "good" or "effective". We have 7 (Wilson, Harding, Hoover, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Obama) that can be considered failures. That leaves 28 that either didn't do anything notable, died before they had time to shine or were just too mixed a bag to judge as good or not.

     That brings us back to liberal anguish. Ideologically speaking they view the government as a force that needs to be harnessed to compel the people into "just" and "decent" behavior. With a colossal narcissist/douche like Trump in the office they can only envision a future full of misery and injustice. They view every action as some sort of fascist plot (proving that they also don't know what fascism is) and they freak out. This reaction is in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The United States has been a force for good since the day it was born. While not every moment of our history has been sparkling it has always been on an upward projection, despite 35 of 45 Presidents being do nothings or actively bad.

     What that should tell us the people of the US living their lives and participating in local government have far more impact on what kind of country this is than whatever suit lives in the White House. This is by design, the President was never meant to have a King-like impact on the day to day character of the United States, only the people can determine that. While the chief executive can do some inexplicable things, they are only temporary and are subject to correction by the voting public. If this wasn't the case, then the list of forgettable names and outright scumbags surely would've doomed this country long before Trump weaponized twitter.