For me the bottomline of the Trump administration is that he has started zero new wars, sparing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. As an outsider I hope that the US will not go back to its foreign military interventions.
Just yesterday Trump administration sanctioned Gibran Bassil, a corrupt Lebanese politician who is very close with Hezbollah. I hope Biden has the same sense to chase these guys down...
In other words, you just like the side of the war that he picked.
Of course, there's probably some dispute over whether intervening to prevent genocide, either in general or in the specific manner it actually occurred under Clinton in the Balkans, is really a negative.
Generally, the US/NATO-led interventions in the Balkans, most notably the US-led NATO-Serbia war, after explicit Congressional disapproval.
Though I suppose those could be excluded since they were interventions in existing conflicts.
Of course, compared to Iraq invasion it was a small scale operation, but is still generally considered Obama responsibility (although of course primarily Sarkozy and Cameron responsibility).
The media got mad when Trump wouldn't attack Syria, and said using missiles made him seem Presidential. Makes you wonder what the media and the rest really want.
If you were 4 years old today, Trump still would only be the second President in your lifetime not to start another war.
The 34 prior years may or may not change that depending on whether you look at starting armed conflict or starting US involvement in the conflict.
The US withdrew from Syria, and it does appear to me that for a moment that were a sense of morality from Trump there, he genuinely did not like the idea that lives would be lost as a consequence of his actions. That is commendable, though perhaps something that should have been considered in advance of such a situation rather than reactively.
But what was the consequence of not intervening? It created a vacuum, into which stepped many military powers, and many people have died or been displaced. We also have to consider the long-term consequences of an isolationist foreign policy.
There is a balance to be found between war-mongering and exerting influence to shape the world positively. Particularly, you have to avoid leaving a vacuum that can be exploited.
At the least we can say he didn't start an arbitrary new war, and that is a small but significant positive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more...
Also he also didn't take Covid seriously, thus helping contribute to hundreds of thousands of people dying? It didn't have to be a political issue.
Care to point out to me where he did this? As far as I can tell, he wants to fire Fauci, has continuously disregarded his advice, and loves undermining him:
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-rally-fire-fauci-chants-a...
* similar, via AP https://apnews.com/article/trump-threatens-fire-fauci-rift-d...
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/25/trumps-du...
* https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-wears-face-mask-in-pu... (note the date on this one-- 11 july)
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/us/politics/trump-fauci-c...
* https://apnews.com/article/00a1dc6f5932c9fe778ee5e9cabacc71
- Glenn Greenwald
Mongolia has zero in total: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/mn
Even China is doing pretty well, with a current daily rate in the low single digits, compared to the hundreds to low thousands of the USA and the similarly poor performance of European and South American countries: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn
If you define "criminal" as "any person who has committed a crime", and "crime" as "any illegal act that can be punished by law", then yes.
By that definition, everyone who has ever received a parking ticket is a criminal too, though.
Seems more sensible to reserve this loaded term (in US context) for the violent crimes and property crimes the FBI releases statistics on.
A criminal is a person who commits a crime.
It is possible, by ceasing to commit crimes and making restitution to society, to return to a state of non-criminality. But while one is still committing a crime, no amount of hand-waving or pearl clutching can make a non-criminal out of someone who is actively committing a crime.
For an illegal immigrant, this would mean either lawful settlement or deportation. Until an illegal immigrant either earns the right to settle or leaves the country, that person is still a criminal.
You can justify doing that by being sufficiently pedantic about definitions, but I don't think you gain anything in the public debate by lumping "people who speed" in the same category as burglars, murderers, etc. In most discussions, it's not productive to view these people as belonging to the same group.
Obviously, criminality is a spectrum. We can debate the seriousness of violating speed limit laws, but the violations are still violations.
But I don't accept dictionaries as the ultimate authority of the meaning of words, just a handy guide. The meaning of a word is whatever people tend to understand that word as. I cannot prove this on the spot, since I'd have to invest time into organizing a survey, but I'm fairly confident that, if you ask a thousand people whether someone who drives over the speed limit is a criminal, a majority of them would say "no" (phrasing of the question will matter probably though).
You can insist on the dictionary being the ultimate source of truth, that is fine. But all that achieves is setting yourself up for gratuitous, avoidable miscommunications. If your theory of language makes communication harder, it seems to undermine the point of language.
The word "criminal" might connote a gravity that offends your sensibilities, but it's accurate. The disconnect arises because modern man sees himself as mostly above the law: Some offenses aren't offenses because (nearly) everyone commits them. We all (hopefully) learn from a young age that this is preposterous: "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?"
I think you'll find that honoring the actual meaning of words makes communication easier, not harder.