1. A Farewell Tribute to President Trump

I want to write this thread based on an opinion piece by Joseph Epstein because it seems so befitting and I am in the mood to reminisce a bit.

2. Donald Trump is likely to go down in history as one of the most effective and most despised one-term presidents in American politics. So despised was he by those opposed to him that even now they won’t admit his effectiveness.

3. But until the Covid-19 crisis, which had much more to do with bringing him down than did Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, Mr. Trump’s policies had vastly lowered unemployment rates, cut away entrepreneurially inhibiting financial regulations, and revved up the stock market.

4. His enemies called him a racist, but his opportunity zones, prison reform and encouragement of black enterprise generally did much more for African-Americans than his African-American predecessor did.

5. In foreign policy he cut America free from a badly conceived Iran deal, made substantial strides toward peace in the Middle East, and showed himself a greater friend to Israel than any American president in recent history.

6. That’s a lot, and it should have counted for a lot, had his rebarbative personality not served to negate these accomplishments. Almost daily he demonstrated he was devoid of graciousness.

7. Without the suavity of the statesmen or the bonhomie of the practiced politician, in both his tweets and most of his public performances he revealed a taste for insult, an unrelenting boastfulness and arrogance, and a general coarseness.

8. That this same coarseness—some would call it directness—appealed to more than 70 million Americans is perhaps a more complicated question. Some of my friends have expressed dismay that so many of their countrymen loyally supported Mr. Trump over the past four years.

9. But I wonder if it was him they admired so much as his high-spirited attacks on the progressive program that seemed to have taken over the country.

10. Imagine yourself a member of the lower middle class recently put out of work by the Covid pandemic and worried about how you will supply your family’s basic needs in the months ahead.

11. You turn on your television set to watch the news, and you see major American cities taken over by rioters and looters claiming they are protesting “systemic racism.”

12. In disgust you change channels to discover kids at Yale and elsewhere denying speakers who disagree with them the right to speak, and then claiming they feel unsafe even behind ivy-covered walls.

13. You change the channel once more to discover your local anchors are delighted to run a piece about the first trans judge in your county, a former man, now claiming to be a woman but who even in a dress looks a good deal more masculine than most.