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So, The 45th President of the United States of America has left office.
Post-Presidential summary? Did he Make America Great Again?
Probably not. Most of our allies disliked him. Much of the world became increasingly convinced that the Americans were going loony. Sure the nationalist were happen. As were the isolationist, since we didn't get involved in any new foreign wars while Trump was President. But everything else...eh. We have over 400,000 people dead due to a virus in just the last year. That's never good for one's record.
Legacy? I hope QAnon sits down and stops its own madness. The Senate will deturmine Trump's fate in terms of being able to hold office again. Trump himself seem to hint at starting is own Party ("with blackjack and hookers"), but I don't see a Patriots Party doing anything more than split the Evangelicals and Far-Right Extremist from the Republican Party.
One thing I can think of as a positive of having the Trump administration, at least on a family level. It prevented us having another Clinton administration, which would have given me four years of having to hear about it constantly from my father and his conservative friends. As it is Trump upset my mother and her friends, but they are far less vocal about it.
Instead I got to observe the shoe on the other foot, so to speak. The same rhetoric, different party, as what happened during the Obama administration. At least for the first two years it sounded like the same crap, different mouth. Only as the pandemic happened, the BLM protests and riots followed by when the vote turned on the Republicans did the tone shift to a more authoritarian and disturbing manner. Even some of the conservatives I know questioned the authoritarian responses to some of the protests (though they sited them as traps that Trump fell for). The Right's Rhetoric since November has been more extreme and desperate. The question will be if it will lighten up during the next four years, or it it will harden and give us more problems. January 6th. To the Democrats looks like an analogy for the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The aftermath, to the conspiracy minded Republicans, was an analogy to the Reichstag fire of 1933. Both see the Nazi rise to power in analogy for the other party, but the hope is that neither is correct and the United States will stand .
Let us hope for the next four years that Biden's administration will at least fix some of the wounds this country has suffered in both reputation and national identity.
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