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Comment by mrhands556 | Hacker News Reader

Before covid the trump presidency had good times to those not paying attention to news articles specifically about trump or late night talk shows.

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I disagree. Riots and protests every few months, half the country losing its shit. Everyday some messed up thing happens, it was like watching a house burn across the street. I mean, I think it is widely known that policies and actions on one term will usually show fruit in the next term. People start spending and investing money slowly once they see things looking up. Look at bush relaxing as many restrictions as he could and getting rid of taxes as much as he could before the 08 crash. Your second term is when the product of your policies are seen. Their first year is spent getting campain promises done as much as possible and getting used to the job (like any employee it takes 6mo-year to be productivr) and 4th year is election year. So it is usually the second and third year after they appointed all the important officials they do anything which means when things take effect is months or a 1yr+ down the road and then you see whatever metric's graph either start going down or up but it is rare for it to peak immediately, could happen but you really can't take credit for economic stuff at least in the first 2 yrs.

Also, keep in mind that americans take away the president's party's majority in congress mid way in the term usually so republican or democrat it is difficult to get things done in their 3rd and 4th year. So their efforts peak at the end of 2nd year and first half of 3rd year and the fruits of those efforts are seen down the road in their last year or the year or two after their last term.

Those “good times” were large an extension of Obama’s term. If you look at the GDP and job numbers of this period and fit a regression line, Trump did not meaningfully alter the slope of the curve, which means he largely inherited a growing economy and road the coattails.

For example…? Because I see children in cages, wanton grift, federal aid based on favors and similar to trump personally.

keyword "trump presidency had good times" so yeah him and his family and inner circle had GREAT times.

If you look at every single precidency pretty awful things were done. Fake child immunization setup to get Usama during Obama administration. Has caused an unveleivable amount of harm to children. Not in cages, just no linger vaccinated for fear of US pursuit.

Yell bad man Trump all you want. He was never the problem, he was a symptom of what is really going on.

Same with Swedish and now Italian elections. Get all the social media upvotes for adhering to the woke and bow to twitter as much as you want.

This is what is actually going on.

I blame super shitty journalism also for this. Thats just a personal irk I have for how oblivious and grossly overconfident and incompetent the media actually is

I think most people are going to find a moral equivalence drawn between "locked up children in cages" and "tricked Osama Bin Laden's relatives into taking a blood test" pretty hollow, even if an argument can be made that the latter led to a complex downstream set of externalities.

The "locking down children in cages" was already being done during the Obama period.

Separating them from their mothers? Nope

>I think most people are going to find a moral equivalence drawn between "locked up children in cages" and "tricked Osama Bin Laden's relatives into taking a blood test" pretty hollow

He's not talking about OBL's blood relatives, he's talking about all the children in Pakistan who aren't vaccinated now because the US's actions caused them to distrust vaccines and those who provide them.

Just off the top of my head:

- made hospitals disclose healthcare prices

- cleaned up asylum rules

- banned Chinese equipment from 5G networks

- enacted criminal justice reform

And the most important: he's the only recent president who didn't start a new war. That alone would be enough to write his name in golden letters.

> he's the only recent president who didn't start a new war

Not for a lack of trying. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani was authorized by Trump and led to several direct attacks on each other and only stopped after Iran accidentally shot down a commercial passenger plane originating from their own country.

He is the first republican in a long time that didn't start a war only because there were already two undrerway and his generals stopped him from starting wars. He was a DC outsider so he didn't know the war starting protocol I guess?

Would be good if our next president doesn't know the war starting protocol as well.

Not if there is a good reason to wage a war. Everyone complains about wars but every war since vietnam had widespread public support at the time it was started.

That's not a good reason to start a war. The Iraq War (2003, not the Gulf War of the 90s) had widespread public support because the CIA fabricated evidence of WMDs to create that support.

that 5G ban was overall trend in all west, certainly not something Trump made(TM). In fact, it would look utterly incompetent for him if all western democracies rejected Huawei 5G hardware apart from US, given his anti-chinese stance.

Some points look nice and sane, but I don't know details. But there are maybe 10,000 different aspects of government, its impossible to not compile list of positive achievements for any president/politician.

I think what Trump opponents have much more beef with is the list of things he did wrong/didn't do but should. That defines politician much more than positive items. Same as person-person interaction in general - its not that important how many positive aspects the other has rather than the negative ones, they define overall tone and compatibility much more.

These are correct, though I would quibble about the "new war" thing a little. Obama pulled the number of troops deployed overseas down sharply, and they increased slightly under Trump [0].

I would also say the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19 is one of the worst in the world in terms of outcomes. It's hard to imagine any other reasonably possible president--including Republicans--doing so badly, and this is solely because they chose to politicize mask wearing. It was a historic blunder that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and billions if not trillions of dollars. Not even the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can compare, which is a wild thing to say.

Second, Trump's agenda was largely ineffectual. He didn't significantly alter immigration policy, his trade wars failed, and his tax cuts failed to produce significant economic growth (though they did increase the deficit). Diplomatically his administration was a complete failure, and it's hard to not lay some of the blame for Ukraine at his feet--whether its his weakening of NATO, his strong support for Putin, or his attempts to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless they helped him tar a political rival.

Finally, I would point to opportunity costs. Presidents can't tread water; they need to make progress over their terms on multiple time scales. While the administration was pursuing a poorly targeted agenda that would ultimately fail anyway, they were ignoring some other serious problems: climate change, US election integrity, labor relations, tech monopolies, prescription drug costs, student debt, housing costs, etc. The Trump administration slept on all of these, putting us four years behind. That's... well it's just very bad.

[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

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