‘Today you get to say I told you so.’
‘Today sir, I don’t want to…but I did bloody tell you.’” — Alfred Pennyworth
It is difficult to overestimate how pessimistic I felt about the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency when his candidacy caught fire in 2015. Taking into account his temperament, his incoherent and bizarre ideology, and his openly authoritarian instincts I thought him not only unfit, but a genuine threat to the people and government of the United States should he accede to the presidency. (I would link as evidence some of the articles I authored for a student-run news site as a 22-year-old undergraduate, but the site is now defunct and my entire archive has been removed from the web — a fact about which I am not entirely unhappy).
That said, I spent most of the first three years of Trump’s presidency being relieved that my worst fears were not being realized. Not, mind you, that his administration did not undertake policies of which I disapproved or that I did not find his personal conduct objectionable; only that he had not sunk to the low floor of my expectations. He would be overachieving as long as he didn’t do anything that threatened the immediate integrity of republican governance in the United States, such as attempting to overturn an election and stirring up his base to violence with conspiracy theories and…