[btomba_77]

Got a 5 years ago today Facebook memory this morning –

This is what I wrote on Nov. 13, 2016-

I know that there will be policy and legislation coming that I don’t approve of. On the environment, immigration, taxes, I will be pulling my hair out. And I know that the Supreme Court is going to lean back to the Right.

I won’t like any of that, but if a Trump Presidency is just bad for liberals in the *usual* way that a Republican Presidency is bad from a liberal perspective, then I can live with that.

That is my hope …. about the best I can hope for.

….

(Here’s to hoping that Trump is independent enough to take that Heritage Foundation list of Supreme Court choices he put out, crumple it up, and go with a wild card nominee.)

[/QUOTE]

It was so much worse than I was hoping for.     … I would say it was worse than I could have imagined, but I imagined it being really, really bad …. and it was.

[btomba_77]

(then I linked this Onion article which at least gave me a chuckle this morning:

[link=https://www.theonion.com/nation-s-optimists-need-to-shut-the-fuck-up-right-now-1819579426]https://www.theonion.com/…p-right-now-1819579426[/link]

[h1]Nations Optimists Need To Shut The F*ck Up Right Now)[/h1]  

[btomba_77]

[h1]The Historians Didn’t buy Trump’s Spin[/h1]  
Historian [link=https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/trump-interview-a-first-historical-assessment/629454/]Julian Zelizer writes[/link] about an unusual Zoom call last summer in which Donald Trump tried to influence a group of historians to rate his presidency more highly.

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summera day after C-SPAN released a [link=https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?page=overall]poll[/link] of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our countrys worst chief executiveshe popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. Weve had some great people; weve had some people that werent so great. Thats understandable, he told us. Thats true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.
 
I am the editor of a scholarly history of Trumps term in the White House, the third book in a series about the most recent presidents. A few days after [i]The New York Times[/i] [link=https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/arts/trump-administration-historians.html]reported on the project[/link], Trumps then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and mesomething that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had done. For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of timemore than any other ex-president that we know oftrying to influence the narratives being written about him. My co-authors and I werent the only people he reached out to. According to [i]Axios[/i], Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency.

But if anything, [b]our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. [/b]He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweetsbecause the former are more elegant and lengthierhe sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.
[/QUOTE]
 

[kaldridgewv2211]

If there was a Mount Flushmore hed be on it.

[satyanar]

Quote from dergon

(then I linked this Onion article which at least gave me a chuckle this morning:

[link=https://www.theonion.com/nation-s-optimists-need-to-shut-the-****-up-right-now-1819579426]https://www.theonion.com/…p-right-now-1819579426[/link]

[h1]Nations Optimists Need To Shut The F*ck Up Right Now)[/h1]  

 
Haha. I like this one. Sorry I missed it. Hard to tell exactly who the parody is about.

[btomba_77]

[b]Thank you Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan [/b]

[img]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FV3Fbj5WQAY0DDt?format=jpg&name=900×900[/img]

[h1]Experts Consider Trump One of the Worst Presidents[/h1]  
A new [link=https://scri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/draft-final.pdf]Siena College poll[/link] finds that 141 presidential scholars rank Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson as the countrys top five presidents.
 
For the second time, scholars include Donald Trump along with Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren Harding and Franklin Pierce in the bottom five.
 

[btomba_77]

[b]Donald Trump: A Unique Loser[/b]

[link=https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1549058394346045441?s=20&t=h6RPouV2GvpwN1l79Dpw4Q]David Frum[/link] notes that since 1896, six presidents who ran again failed to win:
[ul][*]William Howard Taft[*]Herbert Hoover[*]Gerald Ford[*]Jimmy Carter[*]George H.W. Bush[*]Donald Trump [/ul] Of these defeated incumbents, Taft and Bush lost because of a split in their party. Hoover lost because of an economic crisis. Ford and Carter lost due to both a party split and an economic crisis.
 
But Trump lost despite a unified party and growing economy.
 
As Frum concludes: His defeat was a uniquely personal repudiation.
 

Since 1896, six presidents who sought re-election have filled to win it:

Taft
Hoover
Ford
Carter
HW Bush
Trump

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 18, 2022

[btomba_77]

[h1][b]Trumps Legacy: Convincing Idiots to Run for Office[/b][/h1]  
[link=https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trumps-legacy-is-convincing-idiots-that-they-should-run-for-office?ref=home]Matt Lewis[/link]: Donald Trump has left his mark on the American body politic in myriad ways. But one of the lesser-discussed aspects of the way the 45th president forever changed this country is how hes endowed unqualified idiots with the grandiose confidence to believe they, too, should run for high political office.
 

[Unknown Member]

Trumps legacy

The other side is almost as bad as me