A Crisis President Comes to Town
A bright, clear Presidents' Day in Washington: a perfect moment in time and place to say what makes the best and worst of presidents.
For historians, the pattern is indelible. The American people show who the great presidents are, because they bring out the best in us.
The opposite is also true. Three weeks into his second round, power-mad Donald Trump is the worst, going away. He appeals to the darkness in our character every single day and way.
Trump, in three weeks, radically expanded his role and caused tidal waves of misery and grief at home and abroad. With tariffs and mass layoffs, he's the agent of unemployment and inflation in the healthy economy former President Joe Biden handed him.
Let's not even talk about the price of eggs, which Republicans (and the media) falsely framed as the main election issue.
Friends and Romans: Any president occupying the Oval not only reflects but shapes us. In fact, Washington is starting to seem an occupied capital like Jerusalem by the Romans, Paris by the Germans.
In this state of emergency, the former presidents -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- should speak out.
Sometimes I envied my father for being born in 1933, in the depths of the Depression. A born patrician, Franklin Roosevelt, whose cheery, bold voice on the radio comforted the country and his widowed mother, explained the New Deal and saved our souls for 12 years.
I was born in the '60s but don't remember the sparkling John F. Kennedy years -- the tragically short thousand days.
Winning a good war, calling upon the unity and strength of a nation, not only its soldiers but all ages and walks of life, is what Roosevelt had in common with Abraham Lincoln, born dirt poor.
The morale of preserving union, the battle hymn of the republic and human freedom pressed the Civil War on. The Union prevailed amid more blood than anyone imagined: over 600,000 young lives.
Lincoln inspired by his ringing, eloquent words, which traveled from Illinois to Washington. Yet the new president was dismissed by Southern "Slave Power" titans as an awkward outsider they could roll.
Lincoln never started a fight but never lost one either. Determined visionaries of destiny, Lincoln and Roosevelt were masters of the uplifting spoken word and phrase, brilliant presidential prose which lasts to this day.
That's the job of the great "crisis presidents" facing the Depression or Civil War.
Note Trump's rise and voice in the American town square: often online, largely trash talk. Sowing seeds of white nationalism for years infected the body politic.
Ironically, Trump creates his own crisis in plain sight.
Democrats watch, silently spellbound, as Trump gets even with everyone in this town -- and country? -- burned by hate from his impeachments, prosecutions and avenging the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol.
Trump threatened and subdued Senate Republicans into approving some Cabinet secretaries wildly unfit for office. Bobby Kennedy Jr., anti-vaccine crusader, and Pete Hegseth, Fox News host -- really? They are designated to destroy or weaken their departments.
The Education Department is on the chopping block, and the Justice Department is in turmoil, with top attorneys resigning in protest. The president forced out 19 ethics watchdogs and is cutting the Federal Aviation Administration as planes crash.
Trump has dared the courts to challenge his two-line guillotine emails. So far, the jury's out. But you tell me why he had to fire Colleen Joy Shogan, the archivist of the United States, or Deborah Rutter, the cultural leader of the beloved Kennedy Center. Is Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, next?
Billionaire Elon Musk has his portfolio, ramming through thousands of layoffs in a skilled, dedicated, even expert federal workforce.
Vice President JD Vance has the foreign portfolio. In Munich, he denounced Germany (among other European allies) for its fears of its far-right party. Evoking Nazi ghosts in the name of "free speech," Vance moved the German chairman of the security conference to tears.
This spectacle was unthinkable until it happened. Vance's hostile stance toward NATO friends caused a crisis of confidence in the post-war alliance born in 1948.
Trump never cared about all that. He looked at NATO as a money-loser. Now he's eying Ukraine as a money-maker and demanding $500 billion in minerals.
Don't. Let. Go.
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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.
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