(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . "Trump can lose an election and still change American life indefinitely" worst.POTUS.ever [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2022-12-10 Constant signal, tons of noise. Trump has a place in history and definitely wants to ace out Buchanan for the worst POTUS. (2018) James Buchanan is implicated in the coming of the Civil War, but the sectional conflict over slavery was decades in the making, with the south precipitating the fatal break in response to Lincoln’s election. The Great Depression had far deeper causes than Herbert Hoover’s initial actions as president, and although his moves to counter it were ineffective, pulling the nation out of the economic slough was beyond even Franklin D. Roosevelt until World War II. (Moreover, several prominent revisionist historians have cast Hoover in a more favorable light.) Buchanan and Hoover performed poorly in the face of national crises, but they were not causal agents who created these crises or determined their outcomes. The same cannot be said for President Trump. The damage he has done to the nation does not, at least to this point, compare in scope to the national calamities under Buchanan and Hoover, but that damage can be traced back to his causal agency, and almost entirely his alone. To take only a few examples: The refusal to acknowledge that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections and to take measures to prevent such interference in future elections is Trump’s doing. Withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, leaving this nation as an international pariah in the face of a frightening threat to the planet, is Trump’s doing. The degradation of the presidency – a flagrant indifference to his broad responsibilities, a failure to study public policy, a constant stream of insults hurled at an astonishing array of targets (and much more) – is Trump’s doing. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump proclaimed about a nation that he alleged was in crisis under President Obama: “I alone can fix it.” The bottom ranking by political scientists seems to reflect a judgment that he has smashed things rather than fixing them. Because it was only the preponderance of Democrats among presidency scholars answering the survey that led Trump to be ranked as the worst president in American history, maybe that judgment deserves an asterisk by it. But even the independents and Republicans in the survey found little to admire in Trump—a telltale sign beyond partisanship. Like President Nixon, the crises that President Trump has brought on the nation are fully of his own making. Nixon, though, had some strengths as president that have leavened his negative standing in surveys since Watergate. So far, Trump has not given any sign of such strengths. historynewsnetwork.org/... x .@elonmusk is not stupid, but this faux “Twitter files” stuff is stupid. In 2020, the whole world knew what Trump was tweeting. Media outlets breathlessly covered his tweets. Millions and millions of people followed him. Claiming Trump was silenced in 2020 is pure gaslighting. https://t.co/tx1vle9l6b — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) December 10, 2022 Bannon argued the effort had made the presidential contest close enough that Trump could execute a plan to falsely declare victory and try to use bogus voter fraud claims to persuade the courts or Congress to help him remain in office. Here’s how all this relates to Twitter: The Hunter Biden dick pics that, according to Elon Musk, constituted vital free speech were actually posted as part of an organized campaign to use salacious content and outright false claims to hurt Joe Biden. That clearly violated Twitter’s own terms of service. Even now, under Musk, Twitter says that “sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a severe violation” of its rules. Twitter also continues to bar “coordinated harmful activity,” which it defines as “individuals associated with a group, movement, or campaign…engaged in some form of coordination” that will “cause harm to others.” Whatever one’s view of Hunter Biden, there’s little doubt that Guo and Bannon’s New Federal State of China engaged in a coordinated campaign to harm him. The main goal of that effort was to help reelect Trump in 2020. But Guo surely had his own agenda. Numerous former allies, and multiple lawsuits, have accused of him of working as an agent for the Chinese government. Guo denies that, and a federal judge overseeing one of the lawsuits ruled last year that the plaintiffs suing Guo had failed to prove this allegation. “The evidence at trial does not permit the court to decide whether Guo is, in fact, a dissident or a double agent,” the judge wrote, adding that “others will have to determine who the true Guo is.” But no one needs to resolve that question to judge Twitter’s moves in 2020. The effort by Guo and his backers to propagate explicit images and lies to hurt the Bidens was very much the kind of disinformation campaign that social media companies have good reason, even a responsibility, to combat. Twitter’s decision to suppress those tweets, in retrospect, holds up just fine. www.motherjones.com/... x Odds that he will ever be president again (zero). https://t.co/6QWmp4f1fC — Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) December 10, 2022 Trump will not be stopped from endlessly wanting things. And he will not confine himself to the ways in which a president or public person is supposed to behave, in pursuit of this endless array of wants and needs. Looming over every aspect of Mr. Trump’s current campaign is the simple question: Will this be like before? That has a technical, outcome-driven dimension (will he win and become president?) and a more cultural, psychological one (will he dominate American life, and will each day’s news turn on the actions and emotions of one person cascading through society?). Politics is about a lot more than just the outcomes of elections; a long time separates us from the 2024 election, and each day has the potential to influence the ones after. Something can be weak and a considerable force in politics or culture at the same time; someone can be losing and influential at the same time. These things are compatible. The country spent nearly two years hearing about voting machine conspiracies and the possibility of subversion in future elections. Voters rejected all that in many cases. What did the last two years mean for Mr. Trump and these candidates? For all of us? Nobody got anything of real value out of conspiracy theories and Trump recriminations. Not the Republicans, certainly, and that’s been the tenor of much post-election coverage and conversation — the way Mr. Trump’s choices produced certain outcomes that hurt the Republican Party. www.nytimes.com/... 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