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If we're ever going to move past all of this, we're going to have to start putting the Trump era in context.
DJT did many horrible, terrible things, but...
DJT did many horrible, terrible things, but...
...John Adams signed the alien and sedition acts, Andrew Jackson essentially gave the Supreme Court the bird, Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus, TDR was an imperialist, Woodrow Wilson's domestic war policy was essentially fascism...
...Woodrow Wilson's wife ran the government illegally while he was incapacitated, FDR forcibly put Japanese in internment camps, stayed mum on concentration camps when he knew about them & approved the targeted bombing of civilians, Eisenhower's operation wetback was a travesty..
...Jimmy Carter pardoned Jefferson Davis and bungled the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan supported the Contras, Clinton let both Somalia and Rwanda happen on his watch and took a pass on taking out Bin Laden...
...Bush allowed waterboarding and approved a disastrous invasion of Iraq, and a lot of the Trump detention policies everyone decries were merely expansions of Obama policies.
And that's just what I can up with off the top of my head. Every single one of these were either historic mistakes, short-sighted errors, or out-and-out malicious acts.
The presidency of Donald Trump has definitely moved the ball even further down the field of executive autocracy and abuse of office, but let's not pretend he's the first president to engage in these sorts of things, nor will he be the last.
The real issue has always been the nature of the imperial presidency, not merely who occupies it at a given time.
