The case against Trump

41 min readAug 26, 2020

The purpose of this post is to summarize the many reasons to vote against Donald Trump this November. In doing so, this post can also be used as a resource to refute the notion that those who oppose President Trump do so solely for emotional or irrational reasons such as the imaginary “Trump derangement syndrome”.

Update (11/3/20): Given that November 3, 2020 is the date of the United States presidential election, this post will never be modified again.

Introductory note

The body of this post (everything below this note) is divided into sections, with each section’s name being the name of a category. That section consists of at least one reason that President Trump has done a bad job that falls into that category. In addition, every date given in this article for which no year is included should be assumed to refer to the current year at the time of writing (namely, 2020 CE).

The sections are listed below in order from top to bottom:

Lying
Immigration
Health care
Racism
Criminal justice
Corruption and abuse of power
Aggressive language and tactics against protesters
LGBT rights
Climate change and environment
Foreign policy
Economy
Gun control
Undermining the integrity of elections
Temperament and incompetence
Further resources

This post originally contained a lengthy, seven-section (including the conclusion section) list of ways that Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been ineffective and even counterproductive. However, because it was growing really long, I have since removed that list and have re-posted an edited version of it here.

For another detailed description of the reasons that Trump has been a bad president (albeit with a specific focus on impeachable offenses that this post lacks), I recommend that you read Need to Impeach’s list of Trump’s 10 Impeachable Offenses. I also recommend that you read the “Lest We Forget” list on the website McSweeney’s, but be warned, it is much longer than the Need to Impeach link. (At over 800 entries, it may even be longer than this post, but I don’t know for sure.) Also, it should be noted that the McSweeney’s list does not include any entries more recent than the end of this July, and it appears that it will not be updated again, whereas the current post will be regularly updated.

In the final section of this post, entitled “Further resources”, I list several links to websites that I recommend you read if you are interested in detailed expositions of the failures of this president and administration.

Lying

As of July 9 of this year, Trump has made 20,000 false or misleading statements. As of August 26, PolitiFact has rated 70% of his statements as Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire. Compare that to 23% for Barack Obama and 37% for Joe Biden.

Immigration

President Trump and his administration have clearly established themselves as attempting to maximize hostility and cruelty towards non-white immigrants, particularly those from Mexico and the rest of Central America. Given the president’s clearly racist remarks about not wanting immigrants from “shithole countries”, this should be no surprise.

In April 2018, President Trump instituted a zero-tolerance policy on the border that resulted in the separation of thousands of children from their parents. Eventually, Trump decided to solve this problem after creating it himself — part of a recurring theme throughout his presidency — by reversing his own policy change after a huge backlash, including a judge ruling against it. Trump then falsely claimed that President Obama had been the one who instituted the family separation policy. (The cages in question were built by the Obama administration and used by them to house children, and in limited circumstances, Obama’s administration would separate children from parents, such as when doing so was believed to be necessary for the children’s safety. However, Obama did not have a policy resulting in routine, widespread family separations: it was Trump who implemented this policy.)

Trump’s administration has long fought to end DACA, the program that grants temporary immunity from deportation to individuals brought into the United States illegally when they were children. The policy originated in a memorandum from then-President Barack Obama issued in 2012. The Trump administration first officially tried to end DACA in 2017, with Trump telling Congress at the time that they had six months to pass a legislative replacement. In a 5–4 decision this June, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end DACA, holding that the administration had failed to provide a sufficient justification for this attempt. This July, the administration gave a middle finger to our court system by refusing to accept new DACA applicants, openly defying court rulings that explicitly directed the administration to start accepting them.

Though Trump and his defenders sometimes claim that he only wants to stop illegal immigration, and that he is completely fine with legal immigration, this claim is belied by this administration’s persistent attempt to undermine the asylum system, despite the fact that the right to seek asylum is explicitly protected under United States law. For example, this June, the administration proposed a regulation that would permit asylum applications to be discarded without a hearing and “make it impossible for victims of gang-related and gender-based violence to obtain protection in the US”. The president has often supported his opposition to the asylum system in its current form by claiming without evidence that a large and growing proportion of asylum applications are fraudulent.

This July, another Trump administration rule banning people who had traveled through a country other than their country of origin on their way to the United States from gaining asylum in the United States was struck down by a federal judge. The judge, Timothy Kelly, held that the administration “unlawfully promulgated” the rule, which targeted Central American migrants from non-Mexico countries, and failed to show that it was in the public interest. In July 2019, another federal judge, Jon S. Tigar, issued an injunction halting the rule, highlighting the mountain of evidence that, contrary to the premise on which the rule is based, it is not safe for migrants to seek asylum in Mexico.

The Trump administration has also violated asylum seekers’ due process by:

Trump’s administration has also used COVID-19 as an excuse to intensify their many other preexisting efforts to end asylum. Specifically, in March of this year, the administration instituted a new policy allowing them to “immediately deny entry to non-citizens arriving at the border — with no opportunity to request sanctuary”. The administration claims that their efforts are aimed at protecting public health, but in fact, they do the opposite. For instance, ICE is holding thousands of asylum seekers and migrants in overcrowded detention centers with woefully inadequate sanitation and public health policies in place. And even though an estimated 20% or more of those held in these detention centers have tested positive for the virus, ICE continues to actively facilitate the deportation of individuals from these centers to their countries of origin. This actively exports the novel coronavirus to such countries, which have limited health care infrastructure and thus were already struggling to respond adequately to the pandemic.

In June of this year, the Trump administration announced new bans on worker visas, which, though they are purportedly intended to bolster the American workforce and increase the number of American jobs, will likely have the opposite effect. Some companies have already announced that they will move jobs that would have been available to visa holders in the United States to other countries like Canada — meaning this administration’s policies are directly moving jobs from the United States to other countries.

For a more comprehensive list of the inhumane and often illegal asylum policies of the Trump administration, see this page on the website of the National Immigrant Justice Center. For a more comprehensive list of the administration’s attacks on legal immigration specifically, see this page on the website of the American Friends Service Committee.

Health care

As noted by the editorial board of the Lancet, one of the most highly regarded medical journals in the world, “President Trump’s isolationist and anti-scientific adminstration has de-prioritised health and health care.”

President Trump supported the American Health Care Act of 2017, which would cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance. In March 2017, when the original version of the bill was still being debated in the House, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 14 million Americans would lose their health insurance within a year, and 24 million would lose it by 2026, if the bill was signed into law compared to under Obamacare. The bill would also eliminate many protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions — even the modified version ultimately passed by the House, which included funding for “high-risk pools”, did not provide nearly enough funding to offset the elimination of such protections. Instead, the bill would have made Americans with pre-existing conditions either unable to obtain any coverage at all, or enable them to access only inferior coverage, and in many cases allow them to be charged significantly more for this coverage. It would also have destabilized healthcare markets in some states. Therefore, this bill was opposed by many leading medical organizations, most notably the American Medical Association.

Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which eliminated Obamacare’s individual mandate (or, more precisely, reduced it to $0). This had the effect of increasing insurance premiums. This increase was exacerbated by the Trump administration rolling back cost-sharing reduction, or CSR, payments, key subsidies that had previously helped to keep premiums relatively low. This rollback, as well as a 90% decrease in the federal budget for advertising Obamacare signups under the Trump administration, helped to increase the number of uninsured Americans by 7 million during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.

Even in the middle of this pandemic, the Trump administration has made clear through a legal filing this June that it wants to repeal all of Obamacare, despite the obvious lack of any Republican replacement plan that would even keep the number of insured Americans the same, much less increase this number. On the contrary, it is estimated that if the Trump administration is successful in having Obamacare repealed, the number of Americans who would lose their health insurance is between 20 million and 23.3 million. This filing represents one of many attempts by Trump to repeal all of Obamacare, including the protections for preexisting conditions that the president routinely lies about wanting to preserve.

While Trump loves to claim that he will bring and/or has brought prescription drug prices down as president, in the first half of 2019, the number of prescription drugs whose prices had increased was 3,400, a 17% increase compared to the corresponding number for the first half of 2018. And during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, prices for hundreds of prescription drugs have gone up. The executive order Trump announced this July will probably not benefit most Americans — in fact, Kaiser Health News estimated that, in the likely event that it is similar to a previous Trump proposal from 2018, it will apply to just 7% of prescription drug spending in the United States.

The Trump administration wants to impose work requirements on SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a.k.a. “food stamps”) recipients. Their original attempt earlier this year was blocked by a judge in March, who noted that access to food stamps is particularly important now given that “a global pandemic poses widespread health risks.” But in May, the administration announced it will be appealing that ruling, even though hundreds of thousands of Americans and counting were relying on food stamps at the time.

Trump has falsely taken credit for signing the Veterans Affairs (VA) Choice program into law. In fact, it was President Obama who signed this program into law in 2014. Trump did, however, sign the MISSION Act, an expansion of VA Choice, into law in 2018. The main provision of the MISSION Act was to allow veterans to receive primary and mental health care from private physicians if they lived a 30 minute drive or further away from the nearest VA hospital. The problem with this approach of shifting (or attempting to shift) patients away from the VA and toward private doctors is that private doctors tend to have longer wait times and worse scores on quality metrics than does the VA. The president has also overstated the law’s accomplishments, suggesting in May that veterans now just have to go to a private doctor. In fact, as the Associated Press has pointed out, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, “some veterans are being turned away, even when private doctors are available to see them.” In addition, a 2019 House report revealed that the VA “did not adequately prepare facilities, providers, or veterans for the transition”. The VA had also taken major steps to attempt to obstruct Congress from exercising oversight of the law’s implementation.

For a more comprehensive list of the ways that the Trump administration has attempted to undermine and sabotage Obamacare at every turn, thereby attempting to take health insurance and other protections away from millions of Americans, see this page on the website of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Racism

For a more exhaustive list of Trump’s many racist statements and actions since taking office, see the two-part report by Democracy in Color (part 1, part 2).

Though Trump likes to claim that he has been uniquely successful in reducing black unemployment, in fact, it was declining faster under Obama than it has under Trump. The Trump administration has also repeatedly proposed large cuts to the budget of the Minority Business Development Agency. Furthermore, even before the pandemic, there was evidence that the black-white wealth gap was increasing, and the median household income for black Americans in 2018 was below the all-time high for 2000.

In August 2017, Trump claimed that the violent conflicts in the Charlottesville protests — between neo-Nazis and white supremacists on one side and those protesting against their hateful values on the other side — featured “very fine people” on both sides. This represents an indefensible moral equivalence between those opposed to racism and those actively supporting it. In the same month, Trump pardoned sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt for disregarding a court order in a racial profiling case. This sent a message that Trump wants local police officers to help enforce his pro-deportation immigration policies regardless of potential legal consequences.

In July 2019, Trump tweeted at four congresswomen of color to “go back where they came from”. This clearly racist tweet played on a longstanding trope directed at people of color: namely, that they are not welcome in the United States and should return to their country/countries of origin.

In May of this year, after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Trump posted a tweet stating, among other things, that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. This phrase has a deeply racist history of which Trump claims he was previously unaware, but it clearly incites violence against protesters that is wholly unwarranted, and clearly establishes the president’s opposition to anti-racism protesters. In fact, Twitter flagged the tweet because it incited violence in such a brazen manner.

In June of this year, Trump retweeted a video filmed at a retirement community in which one of his supporters chants “white power”. He deleted it within about three hours, and his press secretary claimed, rather implausibly, that he had not heard the phrase “white power” in the video before he retweeted it. Also this June, Trump made it clear that he opposes renaming military bases currently named after Confederate generals who, by definition, were traitors to the United States and fought to defend slavery. In the same month, Trump signed a police reform executive order that did not go nearly far enough. The order, for instance, does not call on police departments to completely ban the use of chokeholds, since it includes an exception for if the officer feels that their life is in danger. By contrast, the Democratic-controlled House passed a police reform bill that did not include such an exception. In addition, both the order itself and Trump’s remarks accompanying it failed to mention racism at all.

Trump has also falsely claimed that the Obama administration did not take any steps to curb police violence or other forms of police misconduct. On the contrary, the Obama administration took multiple steps to address these issues, but the Trump administration undid many of these steps. Specifically, the Trump administration rolled back the following:

an Obama administration executive order prohibiting the military from selling surplus equipment to local police departments.
the Obama administration’s practice of investigating police departments and releasing public reports if any misconduct was found, as part of the DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS.
the use of consent decrees, a crucial tool that the DOJ had used under the Obama administration to combat misconduct and corruption in police departments.

Since early July of this year, this president has ratcheted up his racial divisiveness to even higher levels than usual (which is really saying something).

This July, Trump referred to the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as a “symbol of hate”. He then proceeded to ignore calls for police reforms and the issue of racial bias in policing, choosing instead to double down on praising law enforcement. When confronted in an interview later that month on the issue of police killing black Americans, he merely replied “So are white people,” adding “More white people, by the way.” Of course, this ignores the fact that a disproportionate number of those killed by police are black (one study found that 32% of those killed by police were black, though they make up only 13% of the US population). In the same interview, he stoked racial tension even more by defending the Confederate flag against those who consider it to be a symbol of racism. He also condemned NASCAR for banning the flag and attacked the only black NASCAR driver, Bubba Wallace. The same month, Trump announced his administration would be overturning an anti-segregation order from the Obama administration. He claimed that the order had negatively impacted the suburbs by allowing low-income housing to be built and increasing crime in these neighborhoods, an obviously racist appeal to white suburban voters who want their neighborhoods to remain racially segregated. As part of this attack, Trump has also falsely claimed that the Obama administration — obviously including Joe Biden — wanted to “abolish the suburbs”. These statements and actions are consistent with previous efforts by the administration to weaken protections against housing discrimination.

In August, Trump refused to condemn violent acts committed by his supporters, including Kyle Rittenhouse. In September, Trump directed federal agencies to stop conducting anti-racism or diversity training programs. This action was based on an inaccurate portrayal of critical race theory.

Criminal justice

In 2018, Trump signed into law the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that had been pushed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. He also pardoned Alice Marie Johnson after being encouraged to do so by celebrity Kim Kardashian. However, these actions are anything but representative of the overwhelmingly anti-criminal justice reform agenda and actions of Trump and his administration:

As noted in the “Corruption and abuse of power” section below, Trump has almost exclusively reserved his power to commute prison sentences for people who have a personal connection to him, e.g. his personal friends or those who have directly gotten his attention somehow. He has broken with over a century of precedent by consistently opting to ignore the recommendations of the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
In February 2017, Trump reversed the Obama administration’s decision to end contracts that the Department of Justice had with private prisons.
Trump has repeatedly undermined his own signature criminal justice reform bill in numerous ways, ranging from arguing against those eligible for the bill’s sentence reductions in court to underfunding the programs laid out in the bill.
Trump disbanded a program to create federal prison education systems, and he also shut down halfway houses to aid in transitioning formerly incarcerated individuals back into the community after release.
For a more detailed list of ways this administration has implemented policies that have moved America’s criminal justice system in the opposite direction of the reform it so badly needs, see this link on the website of the Center for American Progress.

Corruption and abuse of power

Though Trump campaigned on a promise to “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington, DC, his actions since taking office have moved the federal government of the United States in the opposite direction.

Trump has abused his power in ways that clearly constitute obstruction of justice, leading over 1,000 former federal prosecutors to sign a letter stating that he would be indicted if he were not president.

Trump has never fully divested from his business interests since taking office, meaning that he violates the Constitution every time a member of any country’s government patronizes or otherwise make a financial contribution to any of his family businesses. One of the more egregious examples of this form of corruption occurred in 2018, when the US government paid $77,000 to Trump’s golf course in Scotland ahead of Trump’s visit there. In 2017, DAMAC Properties, a partner of Trump’s company, awarded a contract to a Chinese government-owned construction firm to work on a new Trump golf club in Dubai, blatantly breaking his promise that his family business would not engage in transactions with foreign governments while he was president. As of this February, Trump has spent $110 million of taxpayer money golfing, and taxpayers have even paid for business and hunting trips that his children have taken. This February, the Washington Post reported that the Secret Service had spent almost $500,000 to Trump’s companies since he took office, and this August, the same paper reported that $900,000 of taxpayer money has gone to enrich Trump’s family businesses since he took office.

By accepting payments from foreign leaders and diplomats through his businesses and properties, Trump has been violating the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clause since taking office. This October, OpenSecrets calculated that Trump had made $200 million from his foreign business interests since 2016. As of September 2019, Trump had made at least a million dollars each year through foreign governments patronizing his properties. Though the Trump Organization claims to be donating all of its foreign profits, the amounts donated are dwarfed by the actual profits received from foreign governments: in the first four months after Trump’s 2016 election victory, Saudi Arabia alone spent more money than that at Trump International Hotel. The Trump Organization claims, for example, that as of mid-2019, it had made about $240,000 in foreign profits that it was then donating to the U.S. Treasury. However, the organization has not released any details about how this number is calculated or the definition of “foreign profit” that they use. The blatant corruption of foreign dignitaries paying to stay at Trump’s hotels, indirectly enriching Trump himself, is supported by an unusually narrow interpretation of the Emoluments Clause by the Department of Justice that runs counter to historical precedent.

Trump has engaged in blatant nepotism by appointing his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, to positions in his own White House. These appointments clearly violated the intent of the federal anti-nepotism statute. Trump has appointed all manner of corporate executives to leading positions in his administration, ranging from ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson (as Secretary of State) to Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin (as Secretary of the Treasury) to Wall Street billionaire Wilbur Ross (as Secretary of Commerce) to former Goldman Sachs president and CEO Gary Cohn (as director of the National Economic Council) to former Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan (as Secretary of Defense). Ross later got caught inflating his net worth by a whopping $2 billion, leading his removal from the Forbes 400 list; as Secretary of Commerce, he was later called out by the Office of Government Ethics for refusing to sell stock after promising to do so, violating his ethics agreement. A 2018 report stated that Ross had scammed people out of a total of $120 million. Many of Trump’s appointees have had to resign or been forced out over corruption scandals, ranging from anti-EPA head of the EPA Scott Pruitt (whose numerous examples of corruption included spending $43,000 on a sound booth) to HHS secretary Tom Price (who wasted $341,000 on air travel). Trump replaced Pruitt with former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, part of a pattern in which Trump’s administration had hired 281 lobbyists halfway through his first term, four times the number that had worked in the White House during the first six years in the Obama Administration.

Trump has filled a dozen high-ranking positions with pharmaceutical industry executives and lobbyists, and this industry spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on lobbying both the Trump administration and Congress in 2017. Also in 2017, after Price resigned as HHS secretary due to the aforementioned air travel scandal, Trump replaced him with former pharmaceutical executive Alex Azar.

Trump directed Michael Cohen to violate campaign finance laws by paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money in October 2016. Therefore, Trump himself clearly helped Cohen commit these crimes and so is also guilty of violating campaign finance laws, as Cornell law professor Jens David Ohlin has pointed out. Trump loves to act like a dictator, and always wants to follow his own impulsive urges, so he has falsely claimed that Article II of the US Constitution gives him the power to do whatever he wants. His desire to be an authoritarian dictator is also evidenced by his frequent cozying up to and praising other strongman leaders such as Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin.

In 2017, Trump fired FBI director James Comey, who was then overseeing the investigation into the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 election. This investigation had expanded to include Trump and his campaign because of their contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. Trump infamously told Comey “I hope you can let this go”, referring to Comey’s investigation into Trump’s then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Trump firing Comey was clearly an attempt to derail the investigation, and his attempt to pressure Comey not to investigate Flynn was similarly an attempt to wrongly interfere in the investigation.

In December 2018, Trump partially shut down the government because Congress refused to pass a federal funding bill that included money for his border wall (which, remember, is supposed to be paid for by Mexico, not American taxpayers). His unexpected refusal to sign such a bill unless it included money to pay for this wall sent Congress scrambling in their last session of the year. The resulting shutdown was the longest of its kind in American history, lasting 35 days until Trump caved to Democrats the following January. A mere three days after claiming “We will not cave”, he signed a bill to temporarily reopen the government agencies that had been shut down. The effects of this shutdown were significant: 800,000 federal workers missed their paychecks, and many airports experienced significant delays across the East Coast. The following February, Trump declared a national emergency to allow him to access further funding to pay for the wall. However, he acknowledged that his declaration was not based on an actual emergency, saying at a press conference, “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

In 2019, Trump was impeached for abusing his power to try to force Ukraine’s government to publicly announce an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden over debunked allegations of corruption regarding Hunter Biden serving on the board of Burisma when his father was Vice President. (For more debunking of allegations of corruption regarding Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Ukraine, see here and here.) Of note, Trump only wanted an investigation to be publicly announced, and never mentioned that he cared about it being actually conducted. This abuse of power included Trump holding up military aid that was supposed to be sent to the Ukraine, an action later determined to be illegal by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. Democrats also called on numerous witnesses to testify in Trump’s impeachment proceedings in the fall of 2019, collectively painting a clear picture that the president abused power to try to extort Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate Biden. Of course, this April after the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump, he fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s preeminent watchdog who originally informed Congress in September 2019 about the concerning content of Trump’s now-infamous call with Zelensky. This firing came after Trump fired several other witnesses in his impeachment trial for daring to speak out against him, including firing both Alexander Vindman and Gordon Sondland within hours of each other in February. (In case there was any doubt as to the reason for these firings, the White House had previously promised “payback” against those who took a stand against the president during his impeachment trial.)

Released in April 2019, the Mueller Report, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself, found “…multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.” Contrary to the President’s statements, the investigation did not exonerate the President of accusations of obstruction of justice. On the contrary, Mueller has said, “[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.” Attorney General William Barr later falsely claimed that Trump had fully cooperated with the investigation, when in fact, Trump refused to sit for an in-person interview with Mueller, in addition to repeatedly attempting (unsuccessfully) to fire Mueller.

The report outlines ten instances of potential obstruction of justice by President Trump, noting that his attempts to interfere with the investigation were unsuccessful “largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” These ten instances include Trump attempting to convince Corey Lewandowski to tell then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

Another of the instances of potential obstruction of justice by Trump outlined in the Mueller Report concerns one of Trump’s attempts to have Mueller ousted, specifically, a June 2017 phone call in which Trump told White House Counsel Don McGahn to have Mueller removed due to supposed conflicts of interest (which McGahn and other advisers told the president were baseless). In addition to attempting to have Mueller removed, Trump later asked McGahn to lie about what Trump told him, and to say that Trump merely wanted McGahn to relay concerns about conflicts of interest to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. In fact, however, both McGahn and the Mueller Report agree that Trump was trying to get Mueller fired, and McGahn has recalled that Trump told him “Mueller has to go.” Seven of Trump’s associates were convicted of crimes, and then sentenced for those crimes, as a result of the Mueller investigation: Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Richard Pinedo, Alex van der Zwaan, Roger Stone, and Rick Gates.

In July 2019, after the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, Trump tried again, instead issuing an executive order to try to get around the ruling by tapping existing government records. This July, Trump doubled down with yet another unconstitutional executive order arguing that non-citizens should not be counted in the Census, explicitly contradicting the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The requirements set out in the more recent executive order would be almost impossible for the Census to meet. This September, this latest attempt to keep undocumented immigrants from being counted in the Census was blocked by a three-judge court.

In November 2019, while he was being impeached, Trump sent a tweet attacking Marie Yovanovitch while she was testifying against him. Most of the 7 legal experts Vox spoke to shortly thereafter agreed that this action was an impeachable offense, and a similar consensus was evident from the legal experts Insider spoke to. During his impeachment last year, Trump also directed many of his top administration officials and advisors to defy Congressional subpoenas, despite the fact that, as law professor Michael Gerhardt has stated, “Anybody subpoenaed by Congress is required to comply because that has the force of law”. This led the House to make obstruction of Congress one of their two articles of impeachment against the president. The Trump administration did not produce any documents in response to a total of 71 specific requests made to different branches of the federal government. And of course, while attempting to obstruct Congressional investigations at every turn, Trump has told the most absolute, unequivocal lie possible on the matter: that he has been “the most transparent president and administration in the history our country by far”. Of note, Trump’s refusal to cooperate with these lawful subpoenas is punishable by a year in prison under federal law.

In December 2019, Trump paid a $2 million fine to comply with a court order as punishment for misusing his foundation (the Trump Foundation) to support both his 2016 campaign and his own businesses.

This September, Trump rolled out an executive order attempting to withhold federal funding from cities that he considers “anarchist jurisdictions”. This executive order is unconstitutional, because only Congress has the power to impose conditions on federal funding.

Under Trump’s administration, the DOJ has become corrupted to unjustly benefit the president and his friends. This June, Barr tried to fire Geoffrey Berman, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, and replace him with Jay Clayton, a Trump golfing buddy with no prosecutorial experience. Berman had investigated and prosecuted several of Trump’s associates, notably Michael Cohen, as well as two of Rudy Giuliani’s associates. Berman, however, refused to step down, despite Barr having initially announced that Berman would do so. Ultimately, Berman agreed to step down so long as he would be replaced not by Clayton, but by his own chosen replacement, Audrey Strauss. This February, just a day after Trump tweeted his disapproval of the sentencing recommendation issued for his ally Roger Stone, Barr shocked officials by intervening and replacing the recommendation with a new, lighter one. Trump then proceeded to congratulate Barr on Twitter, while Barr’s interference prompted four career prosecutors to quit Stone’s case. Aaron Zelinsky, a Justice Department prosecutor, testified this June that the Stone case was the only time in his many years in the United States government in which he saw political considerations influence sentencing decisions. Zelinsky explicitly stated that Stone received special treatment “because of his relationship to the president.” This, along with Trump commuting Stone’s sentence in July, reflects Trump’s preference for reserving his powers of pardoning and commuting sentences almost exclusively for his personal friends and/or political allies. A Washington Post investigation published this February revealed that most of Trump’s invocations of clemency (a category including both pardons and commutations) “have gone to well-connected offenders who had not filed petitions with the pardon office or did not meet its requirements.” This September, the Trump administration asked the DOJ to intervene in the libel case filed by E. Jean Carroll against Trump. Now, the Trump administration wants the DOJ to defend the president’s personal interests, even though taxpayers will have to foot the bill if Trump loses the case.

Besides the DOJ, Trump has appointed three justices to serve on the federal judiciary who were deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association (ABA). Trump has also made clear that he does not want to wait until the ABA had issued their ratings for potential judicial nominees before officially nominating them. By contrast, President Obama did wait for these rating to be issued first, and he never nominated any potential judges who were deemed “not qualified” by the ABA.

Even during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many people with connections to Trump and his family have benefited from the federal government’s COVID-19 aid: 27 clients of lobbyists with connections to Trump alone have raked in $10.5 billion. More than 100 companies whose owners and/or operators are Trump donors received as much as $273 million in small business relief loans from the federal government. These actions are more difficult to uncover from the outside because the Trump administration is blocking oversight of the federal aid.

In June 2019, the Office of Special Counsel found that Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway had violated the Hatch Act on numerous occasions and recommended her removal from the federal government, but Trump refused to do so. Conway is also far from the only Trump appointee to violate the Hatch Act, with 14 Trump administration officials having been cited by the Office of Special Counsel for violating this act, compared to only two in the Obama administration. Trump and his administration also flouted the act by holding part of the RNC this August at the White House and broadcasting a State Department policy-violating speech from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Trump also abused his power to spend money that was allocated for military construction projects to try to build his border wall. This June, a federal appeals court ruled as much, holding that the diversion of funds from the construction projects was illegal and that the administration had been pushing ahead with plans to build the wall with utter disregard for environmental regulations. This August, the Government Accountability Office found that Trump had illegally appointed two of his administration officials, namely Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chad Wolf and acting deputy of the DHS Ken Cuccinelli.

Aggressive language and tactics against protesters

In June of this year, Trump had peaceful anti-police brutality protesters in Lafayette Square tear-gassed to make room for him to walk to a church, where he posed for a photo op. A US national guard officer later testified that some aspects of the administration’s explanation of this decision were inaccurate, and that the administration’s clearing of the protesters was “unprovoked” and an “excessive use of force”. Also that month, the president called overwhelmingly peaceful protesters outside his Tulsa rally “thugs”.

In July, Trump sent federal agents into Portland, Oregon, against the wishes of both Portland mayor Ted Wheeler and Oregon governor Kate Brown. He did so despite the fact that, as Governor Brown said later that month, “It is very, very clear that the presence of federal officers here added, simply, gasoline to an already challenging situation.” Similarly, Mayor Wheeler has said, “…after nearly five weeks of demonstrations, we are starting to see that small handful of people who were engaged in criminal activity — it was dissipating. It was calming down. We believed a week ago it would be over by this weekend. But what happened instead is the feds stepped in with a very heavy-handed approach, and it blew the lid off the whole thing.”

The agents are not trained in riot control or policing American cities. They have detained people on the streets of Portland in unmarked vans, without identifying themselves or explaining to those they have detained the reason for their detention. They fired a “less lethal munition” at a peaceful protester, Donavan La Bella, while he was holding up a boombox, fracturing his skull and face and leading to his hospitalization. Trump has made clear his political motivations behind sending agents to Portland and intending to do so in other large American cities, noting that the mayors of these cities are all “liberal Democrats”.

After Trump sent in the agents, more people returned to the streets to protest. While the impression created by the Trump administration was that this action was justified because of increased violent activity, rates of almost all categories of crime were lower than average in Portland during the first few weeks of July and last week of June. The agents were supposed to protect the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, but they expanded their mandate to a much larger area surrounding the courthouse. Furthermore, after the agents came in, the protests subsequently became more violent, not less. Before the agents came in, most of the “violent” incidents cited by DHS in Portland were instances of graffiti, but after the agents entered the city, both the number and seriousness of violent incidents increased. As criminologist Edward Maguire told Vox, “…the intensity of the protests and the numbers out on the streets had decreased pretty substantially before federal law enforcement showed up. Object throwing, fire setting, graffiti — all that increased dramatically after federal authorities arrived.” And unsurprisingly, shortly after it was announced that the agents would be reducing their activities in Portland, demonstrations occurred for an entire day without any major violence or arrests — the first time this had happened in the city in several weeks.

Constitutional law experts have described Trump sending in these agents against local authorities’ wishes as a red flag. For example, Cornell University constitutional law professor Michael Dorf said,

“The idea that there’s a threat to a federal courthouse and the federal authorities are going to swoop in and do whatever they want to do without any cooperation and coordination with state and local authorities is extraordinary outside the context of a civil war. It is a standard move of authoritarians to use the pretext of quelling violence to bring in force, thereby prompting a violent response and then bootstrapping the initial use of force in the first place.”

LGBT rights

Many anti-discrimination ordinances that were implemented by the Obama administration have been reversed by the Trump administration. Below, I will highlight just a few of them; for a more detailed summary, see this story by NPR.

This June, the Trump administration moved forward with its efforts to remove non-discrimination protections in healthcare for transgender people. However, this August, this effort was blocked by a federal judge, who held that it violated the Supreme Court’s recent Bostock v. Clayton County decision. Other transphobic policies announced by the president and/or his administration include:

Climate change and environment

Trump’s assaults on the environment and manifestations of his active refusal to confront the crisis of climate change include the following:

Trump pulled America out of the Paris Climate agreement in his first year in office, making it clear that he and his administration do not take the urgent crisis of climate change seriously.
The Trump administration also replaced the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulated carbon dioxide emissions produced by electrical power plants, with its own, much weaker plan called Affordable Clean Energy (ACE). ACE, unlike the Clean Power Plan, does not require that power plants meet specific carbon dioxide requirements, only that they increase their efficiency.
The Trump administration changed the rules for calculating benefits from environmental regulations so as to exclude “co-benefits” — i.e., benefits that result from reducing pollutants that the regulation was not specifically intended to reduce. This means that cost-benefit analyses of regulations, in many cases, now systematically underestimate their benefits.
This September, Trump made scientifically inaccurate statements regarding the role climate change has played in exacerbating wildfires in the American west. He also inaccurately downplayed the proportion of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the United States as a “small speck”, even though the United States was the second-largest producer of greenhouse gases in 2019.

Foreign policy

As Business Insider noted in November 2019, “Trump has succeeded in alienating virtually every traditional ally of the US as president, and much of this is linked to his obsession with NATO funding and defense spending more generally.” His alienation of our allies is in large part due to the fact that he often lashes out at allies and hurls insults at them for no apparent reason.

Another reason is that the messaging coming from Trump and the rest of his administration is so inconsistent it makes it very difficult if not impossible for other countries (as well as business leaders) to even understand his position on crucial policy issues. This inconsistency and frequent changing of positions leaves political leaders around the world (e.g. China, Canada, and Mexico) confused when dealing with the president of the United States, since leaders of such countries (e.g. Mexico) know that he cannot be trusted. Indeed, around the world, Trump is viewed with historically high levels of distrust, and his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and alienation of other countries in the battle against it has been devastating to his favorability in Europe.

Trump has claimed to have been tough on Russia, but while he has implemented some new sanctions against Russia, Obama’s actions in response to Russia meddling in the 2016 election were stronger than Trump’s. Furthermore, Trump’s purported toughness on Russia is belied by his many pro-Russia and pro-Putin comments. For example, Trump has made clear that he believes Putin’s denials of his involvement in meddling in the 2016 presidential election over the assessment of the American intelligence community, saying in 2018, “I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.”

In 2018, Trump angered South Korea by cancelling the joint military exercises our country had been conducting with theirs without notice. Also that year, he abruptly moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem specifically to satisfy his evangelical base. In doing so, this administration antagonized Palestine in an manner unprecedented compared to previous national and international precedent. (Previously, the American government had wanted Israel and Palestine to negotiate the boundaries of East Jerusalem, but Trump’s decision precluded many of the potential negotiated boundaries from being considered.) In the same year, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal originally negotiated under the Obama administration. The goal of the deal was to minimize the chances of Iran building a nuclear weapon, and Iran allowed international inspectors to visit and inspect its facilities to confirm that they were abiding by the agreement’s terms. However, as a result of Trump’s withdrawal from the deal and resultant re-imposition of sanctions, Iran has stepped up its nuclear activities, and tensions between the United States and Iran were further escalated when Trump had top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani killed in January of this year. As a result of the killing of Soleimani, Iran announced it no longer intends to abide by most of the deal’s terms. Trump has also escalated tensions with many of America’s allies by walking out of a 2018 G7 meeting and refusing to sign a joint statement that many in his own administration, as well as foreign political leaders, had worked on in great detail. Some further specific countries with which Trump has also escalated tensions include:

North Korea: In 2017, Trump threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on the country, and later that year threatened to “totally destroy” it.
Canada: Trump imposed tariffs on the country, initially focusing on steel and aluminum imports in 2018, angering political leaders in Canada such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called Trump’s rationale for the tariffs “insulting and unacceptable”, with Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland also taking offense at the assertion in Trump’s proclamation that steel being imported from Canada to the United States represents a threat to the “national security” of the United States. Canada also implemented counter-tariffs in retaliation. Trump announced that he would reimpose tariffs on Canadian aluminum again this August, prompting criticism from both American aluminum manufacturer Alcoa and Deputy Prime Minister Freeland.
Mexico: The president who campaigned on an idiotic, racist promise to build an unnecessary and ineffective wall along the US-Mexico border and somehow convince Mexico to pay for its cost has been angering Mexico since the day he came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. In 2017, shortly after Trump took office as president, then-Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto made clear that his country will not pay for the wall, adding, “I regret and condemn the decision of the United States to continue construction of a wall that, for years, has divided us instead of uniting us.” His antagonism towards Mexico as president prompted Nieto to announce in April 2018 that Nieto’s government would be reviewing all of its cooperation with the United States. In the same cabinet meeting in which he ordered the review, Nieto also condemned Trump for stoking conflict with Mexico. His 2018 steel and aluminum tariffs also targeted Mexico.

In 2019, he abandoned our erstwhile allies the Kurds by withdrawing American troops that had been helping the Kurds fight ISIS in Syria. Trump’s antagonism towards America’s fellow NATO members, particularly his suggestions that those countries he considers not to be paying enough should not expect America to fulfill its obligations to such countries, has undermined international trust in the ability of the United States to reliably defend its allies. In the middle of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, Trump has also pulled America out of the World Health Organization — depriving it of a large chunk of its funding in the process — as part of his broader abandonment of our country’s longstanding role in collaborating with other countries on public health crises. This decision was so bad it was opposed by the American Public Health Association.

This June, John Bolton revealed in his book The Room Where It Happened that Trump encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to build de facto concentration camps where Uighur Muslims have been detained en masse, in blatant violation of their human rights. This July, Trump acknowledged that in a then-recent phone conversation he had with Putin, Trump did not bring up the reports that the Russian government had paid bounties to members of the Taliban in exchange for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump was told about the information at least twice in early 2019, both in at least one of his intelligence briefings and by John Bolton personally.

This July, Trump announced that he intends to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany, yet another signal of this president’s condemnation of NATO and unwillingness to support America’s allies. This decision was met with broad bipartisan criticism in the United States, with Republican Senator Mitt Romney describing it as “a grave error” and a “gift to Russia”. In yet another example of this administration’s abject disorganization and inconsistent messaging, Trump himself stated that Germany was taking advantage of the United States and was not paying enough to justify our continued military presence there, saying: “We spend a lot of money on Germany, they take advantage of us on trade and they take advantage on the military, so we’re reducing the force. They’re there to protect Europe, they’re there to protect Germany, and Germany is supposed to pay for it.” But Trump’s own officials gave a logically inconsistent explanation, insisting that the decision of where the troops formerly stationed to Germany will be moved to will not be based on whether the new host country meets the 2% target for contributing to NATO.

In September, Trump declined to condemn Russia or criticize Putin for poisoning Alexei Navalny, despite NATO concluding that he was poisoned with a Russian nerve agent. Trump’s refusal to condemn Russia for this attack also flies in the face of the statement by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that NATO’s members were united in condemning the attack.

Economy

Trump often falsely claims to have greatly improved the American economy, in contrast to his predecessor President Obama. In fact, however, Trump inherited a strong and improving economy from Obama, and the improving economic trends that were already occurring under President Obama’s second term merely continued into Trump’s first at similar, if not even lower, rates. This is true on metrics ranging from GDP growth to job creation. Similarly, if one considers Trump’s repeated claim that the American economy under his leadership is the greatest in history, it is clear that it is false: for instance, GDP growth has been higher not just under President Obama in 2014, but during the 1950s and 1960s. Median family income grew much more slowly in 2018 — the first year after Trump signed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law — than it did during the last three years of the Obama administration.

Furthermore, the above statistics do not even take into account the recent and ongoing recession that resulted from the need to control the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of this recession, the national unemployment rate shot up from 3.5% this February to a peak of 14.7% in April. Since then, it has fallen somewhat to 10.2% this July. Between February and July, the number of unemployed Americans increased by 10.6 million. The recession has also resulted in real national GDP dropping by 5.0% in the first quarter of this year, and by 32.9% in the second quarter.

Trump has long shown an admiration for the use of tariffs as a negotiating tactic. The problem is that these tariffs, whether they have been imposed on Canadian imports or Chinese ones, have had a large negative effect on America’s economy. Indeed, their negative effects on American farmers and ranchers were so pronounced that in mid-2018, the administration began sending checks to them. As of July 2020, this bailout — yet another example of this administration solving a problem it created — had cost taxpayers $23 billion. The national trade deficit has increased under Trump, contradicting yet another of his promises.

Trump’s trade wars have hurt the American economy significantly, and their negative effects have been larger and longer-lasting than many had previously expected, particularly for the manufacturing industry. As two Brookings Institution researchers wrote this August, the administration’s trade war with China has “significantly hurt the American economy without solving the underlying economic concerns that the trade war was meant to resolve.” Indeed, it is estimated that Trump’s trade war with China has hit the American economy 2.5 times harder than the Chinese economy. It is the American people, not China, who end up paying for Trump’s tariffs, contrary to the president’s repeated, false claims.

In addition to the direct economic damage Trump’s tariffs have caused, these tariffs (specifically those against China) have led to greater uncertainty in both the American economy and the relationship between China and the United States. This uncertainty led the Federal Reserve Bank to cut interest rates for the first time since 2008 a day before Trump announced his new China tariffs. Concern about the tariffs’ negative effects on the American economy also sent stocks declining shortly after Trump announced the new tariffs. Trump’s frequent antagonism and conflict surrounding trade deals has led to a decline in business investment, which in turn has been blamed for the slower economic growth in 2019 compared to 2018.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act purportedly benefited the middle class, not wealthy people like Trump and his friends. However, like so many things we have heard from this administration, this was a lie: the average tax cut for the top 1% of taxpayers is 75 times higher than that for the bottom 80%. Furthermore, corporations and the wealthy benefited massively from the cuts. For instance, at least five features of the law will benefit Trump and his family, namely, “lower top income tax rates; the deep corporate tax cuts; a weakened estate tax; a tax break mostly benefiting wealthy business owners like Trump (see below); and real-estate loopholes the law opened.” The law slashed the corporate tax rate for domestic profits from 35% to 21%, and the foreign rate to about 10%. In addition, the tax cuts in the bill that apply to the wealthy and corporations are permanent, while those applying to low- and mid-income Americans are temporary. And while Trump promised that the law would benefit working people, the top 20% of Americans received more than 60% of the tax savings resulting from the bill. These are just some of the reasons that Trump bragged to his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago shortly after signing the tax cut into law that “You all just got a lot richer.”

Also, the Trump administration’s promise that the tax cuts would pay for themselves through increased economic growth had not come even close to being true as of December 2019 (the 2nd anniversary of the bill being signed into law). Instead, the cuts led to a large drop in federal revenues and are forecast to add between $1 trillion and $2 trillion to the federal deficit. Instead of using the money they saved from the cuts to invest or grow their business, thereby creating more jobs, corporations used their massive savings to reward their shareholders through stock buybacks. Economic growth in 2018, the first full year after the tax cuts were signed into law, was 2.9% — exactly the same as it was in 2015 (when Obama was president). It declined to 2.3% in 2019, reflecting a pattern wherein the growth that was happening before the tax cuts continued for two quarters thereafter before declining steadily. The rate of growth in business investment increased temporarily after the law, but this only lasted for two quarters, after which this rate began to decline. In fact, it then declined so much that by the fourth quarter of 2019, business investment was lower than it was in the fourth quarter of 2018. The president has also broken his promise not to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security: in his 2020 budget, he proposed cuts to all three. And of course, growth in the economy is much less impressive when considering that costs of services like healthcare and higher education are rising as well.

For a more detailed explanation of how, even before the COVID-19-induced recession, the “Trump economy” was nothing exceptional compared with the Obama economy, see this USA Today opinion article and this Business Insider article.

Gun control

Trump has previously paid lip service to the idea of implementing stricter, common-sense gun laws in order to reduce the chances of mass shootings and other forms of gun violence. However, these public flirtations with even modest gun-control laws have proven short-lived, and have since given way to his full-throated opposition to such laws and parroting the usual Republican line that Democrats want to take everyone’s Second Amendment rights away. In particular, he has promised to support background checks shortly after mass shootings, but then reversed his position afterward, even threatening to veto background-check legislation if it made it to his desk. This caving to the NRA’s opposition to gun control should not be surprising, given that last August, NRA head Wayne LaPierre talked to Trump on the phone, offering the president “financial support” and asking him to stop supporting gun control. It should also not be surprising because the NRA spent $30 million helping Trump win in 2016.

Undermining the integrity of elections

For much of this year, Trump has spread baseless claims that mail-in voting is uniquely susceptible to widespread voter fraud. Trump has also stated that he may not accept the results of this November’s election. Trump’s administration also made it clear that the president would veto the CARES Act (the third big COVID-19 relief bill that Trump signed into law this March) if it included any aid for the United States Postal Service (USPS) other than a loan. This occurred despite the fact that the USPS’s Board of Governors (all of whom were appointed by Trump) unanimously asked the federal government for $75 billion in aid. Instead, the USPS only got a restrictive $10 billion loan. Trump has since made it even clearer he wants to keep the Post Office from getting more funding, announcing that he intends to veto the bill the House of Representatives passed this August that would provide the USPS $25 billion in new funding.

As mentioned above in the “Corruption and abuse of power” section, President Trump has attempted to undermine the fairness of our elections by trying to extort Ukrainian president Zelensky into announcing a phony investigation into his political rival Joe Biden. There are many other occasions when Trump has openly called on foreign governments to interfere in our elections, including bragging in a July 2019 interview that he would take dirt on his political opponents from foreign governments and publicly calling on not just the Ukraine but China to investigate the Bidens in October 2019.

This September, Trump explicitly told his supporters to try to vote twice, defying warnings from election officials. Voting twice in one election is a federal crime in the United States. In a “telerally” in the state of North Carolina, Trump claimed that voters should do this in order to ensure that mail-in ballots are counted, an action that North Carolina State Board of Elections executive director Karen Brinson Bell has strongly recommended against.

Temperament and incompetence

The president’s infamously poor temperament, lack of impulse control, and frequent changes were all major reasons that the American economy was slowing in mid-2019, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. As president, he has displayed a consistent tendency to change his position on important issues from one day to the next. This has made him unpredictable to other countries’ leaders, as discussed in the “Foreign policy” section above. In turn, this unpredictability renders him a disruptive force and prevents other countries from having confidence that the US will hold consistent policy positions. Even in his first 100 days, he “consistently behaved in ways that undermine his own self-interest,” made false statements and “inexplicably has stood by them in the face of no evidence”, and delivered “completely inappropriate” words when addressing groups.

It has long been widely acknowledged that this administration is thoroughly dysfunctional and chaotic. His style of governing has brought staggering and continuous quantities of chaos and confusion to Washington, so much so that in March 2018 (more than 2 years ago now!), even White House officials were coming to realize that “…the president’s brand of politics guided by intuition and improvisation is incompatible with a competently functioning executive branch.” He has continued to generate chaos throughout his presidency, which is the opposite of what Americans need from any of our elected leaders, least of all from our commanders-in-chief. As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias presciently noted in February 2019, Trump “…has no understanding of how to set a policy agenda or get anything done,” asking, “When you have a president who can’t handle relatively banal problems like a disagreement over a $5 billion appropriation for a pet project, what’s going to happen to us when a real crisis hits?” Unfortunately, thanks to the president’s egregious mishandling of the very real COVID-19 crisis, now we know.

Further resources

The interested reader is referred to more sources if you need more evidence that Trump has been a very bad president: