Can A Democratic President Fix The Mess Trump Created?

(Caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey.)

The idea that many Democrats (and Independents) have is that although Donald Trump has created a real mess and seriously damaged this country's reputation, replacing him with a Democrat in 2021 could quickly remedy the situation. That may be too optimistic, considering the damage than has been done. It may take many years to fix Trump's disastrous actions, if it can be done at all.

The following is part of a sobering assessment by Nahal Toosi at Politico.com:

Democrats running to replace Donald Trump are vowing to wipe away much of the president’s foreign policy legacy.

It might already be too late.

Through executive orders, regulatory changes, political maneuvers and sometimes mere neglect, Trump has overseen major, possibly permanent, shifts in U.S. foreign policy. . . .

Thanks to Trump, current and former officials say, Palestinians may never get a state of their own, Iran may shun diplomacy with Washington for the foreseeable future and U.S. allies may forever be reluctant to trust their American counterparts. Relations with China, the effects of climate change and ending nuclear proliferation are among other challenges a future president may find harder to tackle in a post-Trump world.

It doesn’t help that U.S. foreign policy is increasingly falling prey to partisan fighting in Washington. A Democratic president focused on reversing Trump’s legacy — the same way Trump has tried to erase Barack Obama's legacy — runs the risk of feeding the perception that U.S. foreign policy will not remain stable over time.

“There is a hunger for the U.S. to get back to its traditional role on the world stage,” said Jeff Prescott, a former senior National Security Council official in the Obama administration. “But after Trump, many of our international partners are going to step back and ask whether signing up with us is going to be a long-term proposition.” . . .

In particular, Trump’s approach to two sensitive topics — Iran and Israel — could have lasting effects.

On Iran, Trump has chilled slowly warming relations between the two countries.

It started with Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of a nuclear deal with Iran. Then he reimposed the sanctions lifted under the deal and heaped on new ones.

While most of the Democrats running for president have promised to rejoin the nuclear deal, which was negotiated under President Barack Obama, they must overcome an array of logistical and political hurdles, including Iran’s own steps to violate the deal in light of Trump’s sanctions. . . .

Another area where Trump has perhaps permanently changed the landscape is the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Nearly every step Trump has taken in the area has pleased Israel and angered the Palestinians. He ended U.S. financial aid to the Palestinians, closed their office in Washington and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, despite the Palestinians’ competing claims to the city. In response, the Palestinians have essentially cut off communication with Trump officials.

The Trump administration is also at work on a peace proposal for the Israelis and Palestinians, but the president’s aides have indicated that the plan will not support a separate Palestinian state.

A Democratic successor may recommit the U.S. to a two-state solution — long the American government's preferred approach — and even rebuild some of the bridges to the Palestinians that Trump has torched. Foreign policy veterans say it may be too late, though. Under Trump, an emboldened Israel already has made moves some predict will lead it to annex the West Bank, territory long claimed by the Palestinians. . . .

A Democratic Trump successor will likely rejoin the Paris agreement to combat climate change, which Trump quit during his first year in office. Still, critics say the lost time under Trump — time without U.S. global leadership on the issue — could have caused irreparable damage to the global ecosystem.

A Democratic president could also take office with a new global nuclear arms race under way.

That’s what some fear will result from Trump’s decision to quit the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the possibility he might let another pact, known as New START, lapse. In response, Russia, China and the U.S. have all shown signs that they are already building up their missile arsenals. . . .

The biggest challenge a successor to Trump might face is rebuilding trust with the rest of the world. Already, some foreign leaders have looked to bolster their tieswith Russia and China as the United States, under Trump, has appeared a less reliable global power.

“Other countries have noticed that America can tear things down and blow things up easily, but it has a hard time sealing the deal and getting things done,” said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy analyst with the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “As a result, many countries are moving to assert their own interests with less regard for America’s views.”

Kavanaugh's Confirmation Will Hurt Credibility Of The Court

The chart above reflects the results of a new Change Research Poll. It was done on the evening of September 27th and the morning of September 28th of a national sample of 741 registered voters (no moe was given).

It shows that fully half of registered voters say putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court will damage the reputation (credibility) of that court. I agree.

Giuliani Trashed His Own Reputation In Defense Of Trump

(Cartoon image is by Tim Campbell in the Independent Tribune.

Rudy Giuliani was once a respected and feared U.S. Attorney. Those days are long gone. And by becoming Donald Trump's attack-clown, he is insuring that his last shred of respect is now gone.

The following is just a tiny part of an article on Giuliani by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:

The addition of Giuliani to Trump’s legal team has been part of a larger change in the President’s strategy. During the first year of the Mueller investigation, which began in May of 2017, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, the lawyers leading Trump’s defense, took a coöperative approach, turning over as many as 1.4 million documents and allowing White House staffers to be interviewed. Their public comments were courteous, even respectful. But, just as the cautious and deliberate style of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, and H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national-security adviser, eventually frustrated the President, so, too, did that of Trump’s legal team. Trump wanted a more combative approach. Giuliani told me, of the early defense, “I thought legally it was getting defended very well. I thought publicly it was not getting defended very well.”

Since joining Trump’s team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a vindication, even when he’s had to bend and warp the evidence in front of him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt” and the prosecutors as “thugs.” He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to Trump’s Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs, exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is not seeking converts but comforting the converted.

This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor, Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked “squeegee men” off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along. Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” In Giuliani, the President has found him. . . .

At one point, I asked Giuliani whether he worried about how this chapter of his life would affect his legacy.

“I don’t care about my legacy,” he told me. “I’ll be dead.”

Trump Is Destroying The U.S. Reputation In Latin America

Why did Donald Trump decide to skip the Summit of the Americas recently, and send the vic-president instead. The charts above could be a big clue. Most of the people in Latin America do not like or trust Donald Trump.

These charts use information from a survey of seven important Latin American countries (Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela) by the Pew Research Center in 2017. Note in the top chart, huge majorities in all those countries have no confidence that Trump will do the right thing regarding world affairs.

That lack of trust and confidence in Trump has resulted in a much less positive view of the United States in all of those countries.

In other words, Trump is trashing the reputation of the United States with our Latin American neighbors -- just like he has done in the rest of the world.

Respect For U.S. President Is Lowest Since Bush's Final Years

The top chart is from the Gallup Poll -- done between February 1st and 10th of a random national sample of 1,044 adults, with a margin of error of 4 points.

It shows that the American public is very aware of the lack of respect for Donald Trump among world leaders. Only 29% believe world leaders respect him -- lower than any percentage since the last couple of years of the Bush Administration (when only 21% or 22% thought world leaders respected our president).

The second chart is from a Gallup Poll survey in over 130 countries. It shows that while respect for our president has gone down among both our allies and non-allies, it has dropped the most among our allies. Among our allies, respect for the president has gone from 63.5% to 36.8% -- a drop of 26.7 points. Among non-allies, respect has dropped from 53.9% to 48.1% --a drop of 5.8 points.

Trump has seriously damaged the U.S. reputation in the world -- and sadly, the most damage has been among our allies. Many of them don't believe that can trust us any longer.

2017 Saw Trump Damage U.S. Reputation In The World

The chart above is from the Pew Research Center. It shows that by the end of his term, Bush had damaged the U.S. reputation in Western Europe (specifically in Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Spain). It took several years to tank the U.S. reputation, but by the end of his second term, Bush had it at a very low level.

The election of Barack Obama immediately re-established that respect, and he maintained it at a high level for the eight years of his term. The Trump was elected, and it took him only moths to damage that reputation even worse than Bush had.

The chart below shows that is not only the opinion of those four Western democracies in Europe. It is a global average. It shows confidence in the U.S. has plunged globally since Trump was sworn in, and an unfavorable view of the U.S. has climbed sharply.

More Proof That Trump Is Destroying U.S. Reputation

From GfK.com

Trump Has Seriously Damaged U.S. Reputation Globally

If you have any doubt that Donald Trump has damaged the reputation of this country around the world, then please take a look at this chart. This poll was done by the Ipsos Global Poll. They asked the respondents in each country if they thought the U.S. has a positive influence over global affairs. The green lines show the responses in 2016, and the blue lines show the responses in 2017.

In 2016, 19 of the 21 countries had a majority saying the U.S. did have a positive effect on global affairs. In 2017, only four of the 21 countries had a majority saying that (India, Brazil, Poland, and South Africa). And the percentage dropped significantly in every one of the 21 countries.

It isn't just Americans that think the Trump administration has been a disaster. The rest of the world agrees.

From 500 to 1000 people in each country were questioned in 2017 between April 21st and May 5th, and the margin of error for each is between 3.5 and 5 points.

No Longer The Beacon Of Hope, Equality, & Democracy

(Cartoon image is by Patrick Chappatte in the New York Times.)

America's reputation was seriously damaged on November 8th, and the wound was self-inflicted. It was shocking, not just for U.S. citizens, but for other nations as well. Americans like to think their country is a shining beacon of hope, equality, and democracy -- an example to the rest of the world. But the U.S. showed its ugly side on election day, and destroyed that image. It was revealed that the U.S. is just another template (among many) for the supremacy of division and hate. America has abandoned the moral high ground, and it may be a long time before we can reclaim it (if ever).

This article by Neal Gabler for Moyers and Company is well worth reading:

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:

“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”

I hunt for that affirming flame.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.

The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.

Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.

Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe. . . .

But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.