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Presidency

Wednesday January 20, 2021

January 27, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday January 20, 2021

US historians on what Donald Trump’s legacy will be

‘His relationship with alt-right’

August 15, 2017

Donald Trump will be remembered as the first president to be impeached twice. He fed the myth that the election was stolen, summoned his supporters to Washington to protest the certification of the Electoral College vote, told them that only through strength could they take back their country, and stood by as they stormed the US Capitol and interfered in the operation of constitutional government. 

When historians write about his presidency, they will do so through the lens of the riot.

 They will focus on Trump’s tortured relationship with the alt-right, his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, the rise in violent right-wing extremism during his tenure in office, and the viral spread of malevolent conspiracy theories that he encouraged.

If Donald Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader. – Matthew Continetti is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement.

‘A surrender of global leadership’

November 14, 2017

His attempt to surrender global leadership and replace it with a more inward-looking, fortress-like mentality. I don’t think it succeeded, but the question is how profound has the damage to America’s international reputation been – and that remains to be seen.

The moment I found jaw-dropping was the press conference he had with Vladimir Putin in 2018 in Helsinki, where he took Putin’s side over US intelligence in regard to Russian interference in the election.

I can’t think of another episode of a president siding full force with a non-democratic society adversary. 

It’s also very emblematic of a larger assault on any number of multilateral institutions and treaties and frameworks that Trump has unleashed, like the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the withdrawal of the Iranian nuclear framework.

Trump’s applauding Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, really turning himself inside out to align the US with regimes that are the antithesis of values that the US says it wants to promote. That is something that I think was really quite distinctive.

Another aspect is extricating the US from any really assertive role in promoting human rights throughout the world, and changing the content of the annual human rights reports from the State Department and not including many topics, like LGBT equality, for instance. – Laura Belmonte is a history professor and dean of the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. She is a foreign relations specialist and author of books on cultural diplomacy.

‘Putting democracy to the test’

January 8, 2021

Broadly speaking: Donald Trump, and his enablers in the Republican Party and conservative media, have put American democracy to the test in an unprecedented way. As a historian who studies the intersection of media and the presidency, it is truly striking the ways in which he has convinced millions of people that his fabricated version of events is true. 

What happened on 6 January at the US Capitol is a culmination of over four years during which President Trump actively advanced misinformation. 

Just as Watergate and the impeachment inquiry dominated historical interpretations of Richard Nixon’s legacy for decades, I do think that this particular post-election moment will be at the forefront of historical assessments of his presidency.

Kellyanne Conway’s first introduction of the notion of “alternative facts” just days into the Trump administration when disputing the size of the inaugural crowds between Trump and Barack Obama. 

Presidents across the 20th Century have increasingly used sophisticated measures to spin interpretation of policies and events in favourable ways and to control the media narrative of their administrations. But the assertion that the administration had a right to its own alternative facts went far beyond spin, ultimately foreshadowing the ways in which the Trump administration would govern by misinformation.

Trump harnessed the power of social media and blurred the lines between entertainment and politics in ways that allowed him to bypass critics and connect directly to his supporters in an unfiltered way. 

Franklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also used new media and a celebrity style to connect directly to the people in this unfiltered way, ultimately transforming expectations and operations of the presidency that paved the path for Trump. – Kathryn Brownell is a history professor at Purdue University, focusing on the relationships between media, politics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the American presidency.

‘Reshaping the judiciary’

October 23, 2020

In what he did with judges, Trump has made a long lasting change over the next 20 years, 30 years in how policies will stand up to legal tests and how they’re able to be implemented – no matter what any particular president or administration proposes. 

The courts are controlled by the Republican appointees. Sometimes judges surprise us, but for the most part, the historical evidence is that they pretty much do what their politics and their backgrounds say they will do.

When he supported that package of measures that helped particular people in the black community, like First Step, pardoning people at the same time that he supported an amendment in the appropriations bill that gave a whole bunch of money to historically black colleges and universities for the first time. 

He put all of these things together, as well as having the first stimulus programme making sure that black businessman and entrepreneurs get some of those loans they’ve had trouble getting before.

The effect of all of that, which we will see over time, was in the midterms, a lot more young black men voted for Trump than before. And if that’s a trend, it may help the Republican party.

Trump also made egregious comments about black people and other people of colour, tried to have protests against police abuse disrupted and in other ways appealed to his white supremacist base.

His lasting impact on race relations depends on what the Biden administration does on policy, and on healing and how long the pandemic and economic downturn lasts. – Mary Frances Berry is a professor of American history and social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on legal history and social policy. From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights.

‘Contesting the 2020 election’

December 16, 2020

Contesting a very constitutionally and numerically clear election victory by Joe Biden. 

We’ve had plenty of really unpleasant transitions. Herbert Hoover was incredibly unpleasant about his loss, but he still rode in that car down Pennsylvania Avenue at inauguration. He didn’t talk to Franklin Roosevelt the whole time, but there still was a peaceful transfer of power.

Trump is a manifestation of political forces that have been in motion for a half century or more. A culmination of what was not only going on in the Republican party, but also the Democratic party and more broadly in American politics – a kind of disillusionment with government and institutions and expertise.

Trump is exceptional in many ways, but one of the things that really makes him stand out is that he is one of the rare presidents who was elected without having held any elected office before. 

Trump may go away, but there is this great frustration with the establishment, broadly defined. When you feel powerless, you vote for someone who’s promising to do everything differently and Trump indeed did that. 

A presidency is also made by the people that the president appoints, and a great deal of experienced Republican hands were not invited to join the administration the first go round. 

Over time, his administration has diminished to a band of loyalists who are really not very experienced and are ideologically uninterested in wise governance of the bureaucracy. What has happened within the bowels of the bureaucracy is going to be a slow slog to rebuild. – Margaret O’Mara is history professor at the University of Washington, focusing on the political, economic, and metropolitan history of the modern US.

‘Standing up to China’

May 11, 2019

The last gasps of his administration are the most consequential, as he exerts a control over his most devoted followers and he’s talking about running again.

He forced people to consider what the presidency has become in a way that wasn’t true I think either during the Bush or Obama administrations. Issues like the 25th Amendment and impeachment hasn’t been thought of since Bill Clinton, really.

It’s possible that people now when they think of the presidency are perhaps going to adopt a different stance going forward, knowing that someone like Trump could come along.

It’s possible that Congress will delegate less to the president and take away some authority.

The president has demonstrated that there’s a constituency who’s opposed to a lot of these trade deals and that there are people willing to vote for those who will either extricate us from these trade deals or “make them fairer”. 

The president has also suggested that China has been taking advantage of the United States in ways that are deleterious to our economic and national security – and I think there’s a consensus behind this view. No one wants to be accused of being soft on China, whereas no one cares if you’re “soft” on Canada, right? 

I think people are going to fall all over themselves to be tougher or at least say they’re tougher on China.

Domestically the president had a populous tone to him. It wasn’t ever fully realised in his policies, but we see more Republicans adopting populist ideas. – Saikrishna Prakash is a University of Virginia Law School professor focusing on constitutional law, foreign relations law and presidential powers. (BBC)

Posted in: USA Tagged: 2021-03, Capitol, Donald Trump, Lady Liberty, legacy, Presidency, pulling the rug, statue, USA

Wednesday November 24, 2020

December 2, 2020 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday November 24, 2020

Trump Administration Approves Start of Formal Transition to Biden

November 17, 2020

President Trump’s government on Monday authorized President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to begin a formal transition process after Michigan certified Mr. Biden as its winner, a strong sign that the president’s last-ditch bid to overturn the results of the election was coming to an end.

Mr. Trump did not concede, and vowed to persist with efforts to change the vote, which have so far proved fruitless. But the president said on Twitter on Monday night that he accepted the decision by Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, to allow a transition to proceed.

In his tweet, Mr. Trump said that he had told his officials to begin “initial protocols” involving the handoff to Mr. Biden “in the best interest of our country,” even though he had spent weeks trying to subvert a free and fair election with false claims of fraud. Hours later, he tried to play down the significance of Ms. Murphy’s action, tweeting that it was simply “preliminarily work with the Dems” that would not stop efforts to change the election results.

Still, Ms. Murphy’s designation of Mr. Biden as the apparent victor provides the incoming administration with federal funds and resources and clears the way for the president-elect’s advisers to coordinate with Trump administration officials.

November 14, 2020

The decision from Ms. Murphy came after several additional senior Republican lawmakers, as well as leading figures from business and world affairs, denounced the delay in allowing the peaceful transfer of power to begin, a holdup that Mr. Biden and his top aides said was threatening national security and the ability of the incoming administration to effectively plan for combating the coronavirus pandemic.

And it followed a key court decision in Pennsylvania, where the state’s Supreme Court on Monday ruled against the Trump campaign and the president’s Republican allies, stating that roughly 8,000 ballots with signature or date irregularities must be counted.

November 6, 2020

In Michigan, the statewide canvassing board, with two Republicans and two Democrats, voted 3 to 0 to approve the results, with one Republican abstaining. It officially delivered to Mr. Biden a key battleground that Mr. Trump had wrested away from Democrats four years ago, and rebuffed the president’s legal and political efforts to overturn the results.

By Monday evening, as Mr. Biden moved ahead with plans to fill out his cabinet, broad sectors of the nation had delivered a blunt message to a defeated president: His campaign to stay in the White House and subvert the election, unrealistic from the start, was nearing the end. (New York Times) 

 

Posted in: USA Tagged: 2020-40, concede, concession, denial, Donald Trump, election, Joe Biden, Presidency, transition, twitter, USA

Monday March 16, 2020

March 23, 2020 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Monday March 16, 2020

What historians heard when Trump warned of a ‘foreign virus’

For immigration historians and other scholars, the way US President Donald Trump is describing the coronavirus pandemic has a familiar ring.

“This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” Trump said in an Oval Office address Wednesday night. “I am confident that by counting and continuing to take these tough measures we will significantly reduce the threat to our citizens and we will ultimately and expeditiously defeat this virus.”

Coronavirus cartoons

As soon as Trump’s words describing a “foreign virus” hit the airwaves, Nükhet Varlik knew she’d heard them before.

“We’ve had plenty of examples of this in the past. It’s mindblowing that this still continues,” said Varlik, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and at the University of South Carolina.

“It opens up the ways of thinking about disease in dangerous ways,” she said. “Once you open that door…historically we have examples, we know where it goes. And we don’t want to go there. I find it extremely dangerous.”

It’s the latest chapter in a story that historians see as centuries in the making. From the plague to SARS, whenever an outbreak spread, racism and xenophobia weren’t far behind. 

Here’s what scholars told CNN about some of history’s shameful episodes, and the lessons we can learn from them: The ‘Black Death’ in the 14th century; Cholera outbreaks in New York in the 19th century; 1900 Quarantines in San Francisco’s Chinatown; Health screenings and quarantines on Ellis Island; and SARS (Continued: CNN) 

 

Posted in: International, USA Tagged: 2020-10, Coronavirus, covid-19, Donald Trump, Presidency, USA

Tuesday April 25, 2017

April 24, 2017 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday April 25, 2017

Trump struggled to keep promises in his first 100 days — and it may not get easier

President Donald Trump declared last week that “no administration has accomplished more” in its first 90 days than his.

But Trump has a lot more work to do in just a few days if he wants to meet the goals he set out for his first 100 days in office. Day 100 is Saturday.

Trump stormed into office promising a quick overhaul of the American government: repealing and replacing Obamacare, reforming the tax system, refreshing U.S. infrastructure, cracking down on illegal immigration and ridding Washington of corruption. He promised to eradicate bad trade deals, roll back regulations and hit back at China for its lopsided trade policies.

Trump on Friday tweeted that the 100-days standard “ridiculous,” he has accomplished “a lot” during his short time as president. But the president himself set goals for that exact timeline before he took office.

Trump set out a “contract with the American voter” that included a “100-day action plan.”

Voters who wish to hold Trump to the contract would do well to read the fine print. Rather than achieving his promises, the contract calls for his administration “to immediately pursue” three, multipoint action items intended to “clean up corruption,” protect American workers and “restore security.”

The White House has proven effective in selling Trump’s executive orders — which are often largely symbolic or only direct agencies to review policies — as policy victories, said John Hudak, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. But he believes Trump will ultimately get judged on the “big-ticket” pledges that require congressional action — namely tax reform, health-care changes and infrastructure funding. The president promised those policies would help to boost economic growth and improve Americans’ well-being.

“What people are focused on are jobs — beyond the executive orders — health care, the broader economy, taxes,” Hudak said. “He can sell as many orders as he wants, but it’s still going to come back to these big, flashy policy failures. It’s hard to hang a presidential legacy on executive orders.” (Source: CNBC) 

 

Posted in: USA Tagged: 100 days, cake, cupcake, Donald Trump, Presidency, USA

Thursday November 24, 2016

November 23, 2016 by Graeme MacKay

2016-11-24

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday November 24, 2016

Donald Trump Raises Prospect of Keeping Ties to His Firms

Donald Trump indicated Tuesday he was unlikely to disentangle himself from his business empire as fully as he previously suggested, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest while president.

Mr. Trump and his representatives said during the campaign he would have nothing to do with his businesses if he became president, promising a “total and complete separation.”

But since the election, Mr. Trump has met with foreign business partners and involved daughter Ivanka Trump in such discussions, even though he has said his children will run his companies during the presidency as a way to separate their operations from the White House.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump told the New York Times that “the law’s totally on my side” and that “the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

Mr. Trump’s comments came after the Republican contended with other concerns overhanging his transition. Trump University disclosed a $25 million settlement Friday resolve litigation involving allegations of fraud at the defunct organization. And Mr. Trump’s charitable foundation said in a tax filing that it had engaged in self-dealing 2015 and prior years that resulted from payments to “disqualified persons,” or foundation insiders.

The president and vice president are exempt from laws that make it a crime for all others working for the executive branch to use their public office for their own enrichment. (Source: Wall Street Journal)

 

Posted in: Business, USA Tagged: business, conflict of interest, Donald Trump, driving, politics, Presidency, USA, Washington
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This website contains satirical commentaries of current events going back several decades. Some readers may not share this sense of humour nor the opinions expressed by the artist. To understand editorial cartoons it is important to understand their effectiveness as a counterweight to power. It is presumed readers approach satire with a broad minded foundation and healthy knowledge of objective facts of the subjects depicted.

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