Erin Schaff / The New York Times
President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event on behalf of Georgia’s Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, in Dalton, Ga., on Monday, Jan. 4, 2021. The White House was propelled deeper into crisis as officials resigned in protest and prominent Republicans broke with the president after he incited a mob that assaulted Congress.
Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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When President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in today, his administration will inherit a staggering set of problems.
An economy in ruins. A public health crisis that will claim more American lives in its first year than World War II did in four years of U.S. involvement. A GOP deranged by sustained lies about the election that metastasized into the worst attack on the U.S. Capitol in more than 200 years and threats of continued political violence from the right. Climate damage that poses a spiraling threat. A hollowed-out government and shredded social safety net. And much more.
But while Biden’s challenges are particularly steep, in one respect there’s nothing new about his presidency. For four decades, America has been locked in a cycle of Republicans breaking the country, voters electing Democrats to fix it, and then the GOP regaining power using the politics of fear and deception to convince Americans that the country is in a shambles when it’s actually on the mend. Then the GOP breaks America once more and the cycle resumes.
When President Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1992, 10 million Americans were unemployed and the nation was facing record deficits. Poverty was on the rise, and job creation was at the slowest rate since the Great Depression. When Clinton left office, unemployment was at its lowest level in more than 30 years, the nation had its first budget surplus in decades and family income was up significantly.
Then George W. Bush was assigned the presidency by the Supreme Court. The budget surplus vanished as the Bush administration cut taxes (which heavily favored the ultrawealthy and supercharged income inequality among Americans) and poured trillions into the unnecessary war in Iraq (which fractured the Middle East). Bush and the Republicans then pushed America to the brink economically with their laissez-faire economic practices, setting the stage for the Great Recession by letting financial institutions run wild. The banks then promptly begged taxpayers for a bailout to their own excesses.
Enter Barack Obama, who came into office facing the threat of complete collapse of the financial system, unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression, and the U.S. bogged down in overseas wars that had become intractable. Eight years later, Obama handed Donald Trump a thriving economy with three straight years of steady job growth — 8.1 million jobs, compared with 6.6 million during President Donald Trump’s first three years in office. Osama Bin Laden had been located and killed, and America’s Kurdish allies were helping contain extremist threats in the Middle East. The Trans Pacific Partnership provided a mechanism to stifle China’s economic growth and presented a soft-power means of restraining that nation’s human rights issues. And the Paris climate accords, which Obama signed America into, promised positive movement to curb global warming and further grow the world economy.
But with Trump’s escalator-ride candidacy announcement, progress became a scorched-earth path of destruction. Riding a lie that the economy is in a tailspin and fueling false fears of violent crime, Trump was elected and chaos ensued. And like his escalator, Trump took America straight down.
The Trump/GOP tax cuts pushed trillions into the hands of the wealthiest Americans at the cost of the middle class. Trump’s tough talk on China masked what in reality was a soft hand, as pulling out of the TPP allowed China to explode economically. Today it holds the majority of America’s debt and is throwing its weight around with abandon through its subjugation of Hong Kong and threats to Taiwan. European alliances that have contributed mightily to world peace since WWII are weakened or demolished, the U.S. betrayed the Kurds to Turkey, and the Taliban is preparing to return to power in Afghanistan.
Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accords and his assault on Obama’s responsible climate regulations ensured a more toxic planet. His racist rhetoric, comfort to right-wing extremists, voter suppression and policies that disfavored minority communities left people of color feeling the return of the bleak Jim Crow days. He destroyed America’s human rights standards by caging children and breaking up families, to name one way.
With bumbling malice, Trump created a crisis a minute for years, then came his first external crisis — the COVID-19 pandemic. His monumental failure to address the pandemic led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions unemployed and catastrophic economic damage.
But Trump’s destruction continued unabated to the end, as he and the GOP fomented political violence on the national stage for the first time since the Civil War. His denouement saw him betraying his oath of office and leading an insurrection against Congress based on his false claim of election rigging.
In the country he leaves behind, we are sick and dying, our economy shattered, a portion of us so brainwashed by right-wing propaganda that we now face an enduring period of domestic terrorism. Trump exits with the world in a geopolitical vacuum, China triumphant after he let it go unleashed, Hong Kong’s democracy fallen, Taiwan under threat (and this could lead to war), the Middle East riven by ethnic and religious hostilities, famine and instability, Europe struggling, our allies uncertain of us, Britain alone, Russia chuckling, a planet mortally wounded, white supremacists openly on the prowl, and a percentage of the population believing outlandish conspiracy theories.
Trump and the GOP have again broken America, as Republicans always do: Democrats hand over a country on the upswing, and the Republicans tear it down with their smash-and-grab policies for the wealthy.
Yet with the change in administration comes a new opportunity to break the infuriating cycle of the past 40 years. Democrats, as they’ve done for decades, are rolling up their sleeves to yet again rebuild from the GOP-inflicted wounds.
By pulling together, Americans can fix the smoking ruin of yet another period of Republican rule and put the nation on a path to longer-term prosperity.
Nothing is forcing us to stay on our current tennis-match pattern of recovery and destruction; the choice to go another way lies entirely in our hands. Let’s simply remember which party fixes America and which party breaks it the next time we arrive at the polls.
