Trump: The U.N. is useless (probably) and Tylenol causes autism (not likely). How we got here.
A brief political history of the 21st century United States.
Each morning, right after putting the Groms on the bus for school at 7 a.m., I drive four miles down the mountain into town to read the news over coffee. It is not usually an uplifting experience. What passes for news these days is generally by dumbasses, for dumbasses, and about dumbasses. Most days, before I even touch my cold brew, I want to drive a railroad spike through a kneecap. Reading the news is like peering into an alternative universe where gravity is replaced by dumbassery. The only thing more distressing than the view is how hard it is to figure a way out.
From today’s The New York Times: “Zackery Died After Climbing on Top of a Subway Train. Who Is to Blame?” From the Associated Press: “Missouri woman gets more than 4 years in prison for trying to sell off Elvis Presley’s estate.” From the Wall Street Journal: “Are These Fish Sending a Message With Their Mysterious Spots?” And last, but certainly not least, from The Washington Post: “What can happen if you let people wear their germy shoes in your house.”
Where’s the hammer? I dropped it somewhere after the first kneecap.
We live in extraordinary times, and I am far from the only person in America wondering if our best days are behind us. In the past, this was more of an abstract exercise with me than a point of genuine concern. But no more. These days I think that it’s more difficult to argue that we are not swirling around a drain. And I will argue that the chrome handle that instigated the flush has been depressed for the entire 21st century.
At the dawn of the century, in the year 2000, George W. Bush was elected the 43rd president of the United States, serving from 2001 to 2009. Bush had been a governor, a baseball executive, and an oilman before becoming president. Prior to being elected president, Bush was most notable as a prototypical “C” student scion of the wealthy Bush family and son of George H. W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States.
Bush 43 was, in my opinion, the worst POTUS of this century. He half botched the military response to 9/11. He then used 9/11 as an excuse for attacks on the civil liberties of all Americans and to increase the size of the government with entirely new, yet predictably ineffective bureaucracies. He invaded a country, Iraq, under false pretenses using ginned-up intelligence, thus diluting our efforts in Afghanistan, where many of our actual enemies were on the lam. Bush spent trillions of dollars on misguided and misbegotten efforts that, just coincidentally, enriched many of his associates at the expense of American taxpayers.
Rather than breaking off a foot in the fannies of the Saudis (where fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from), he embraced them, to the point of flooding American universities with the dregs of Arab society courtesy of the King Abdullah scholarship program.
Bush worsened the already dire situation in Gaza by agreeing with a proposed unilateral Israeli disengagement and simultaneously declaring support for a Palestinian state. I’m reasonably sure that then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon laughed about this all the way to his grave.
Oh yeah, and he looked into the eyes of Russian President Vladimir Putin; he saw his soul. Bush somehow managed to bat .000 in foreign relations acumen.
A fact about this period lost in the cracks of history is the degree to which the media (most notably The New York Times) decided to abandon actual journalism to get behind a narrative that their minutes of experience in deciphering intelligence led them (along with some help and encouragement from the Bush administration) to believe about weapons of mass destruction and the need to invade Iraq.
The only thing the Bush administration lacked in terms of a hammer was a Disinformation Governance Board to crack down on apostates. Instead, they had the USA Patriot Act.
One of the best things that Donald Trump accomplished in his first term, IMO, was laying the groundwork for getting us out of Afghanistan. His method may have been flawed (and made worse by his successor), but it was a means to a necessary end. We could and should have completed everything we needed to in Afghanistan well before the end of the first decade following 9/11. Instead we squandered trillions of dollars, much of which funded blatant corruption, in an enterprise that came nowhere near justifying its cost in either blood or treasure.
Then came the Bush 43 capstone, the subprime mortgage-fueled financial crisis of 2007-08, which, of course, absolutely no one saw coming.
The lessons from the turn of the century? The government lies, the experts lie, and the media lies—yet they get away with what you and I would be sent to GITMO for. The people who run the world are either wildly, seraphically incompetent or vying for places in the 4th, 8th, and 9th circles of hell. And one more thing: when you screw up in politics, you can sell paintings to get by.
Then came Barry.
Barack Hussein Obama II was elected POTUS in 2008 and served as the 44th president from 2009 to 2017. Obama, a graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School, had been a senator from Illinois and a community organizer in Chicago before becoming president. Before becoming POTUS 44, he was mostly known as an orator.
Obama took office in the midst of the Great Recession, bringing with him advisors who believed that some troubled financial institutions were too big to fail. TBTF is a controversial (albeit possibly true) take on unfettered capitalism. It’s the reason why the government shouldn’t just look the other way every time someone bribes them with campaign contributions to do exactly that.
Obama employed a two-pronged strategy to address the chaos he faced early in his presidency: first, he threw a lot of taxpayer money at the financial crisis, and second, he fully committed himself to a controversial (except in terms of legacy) push for government-sponsored health care while the financial world was still on fire.
Despite his high-minded rhetoric, Obama played hardball with political opponents, earning deserved animus in the process. Was he the victim of thinly disguised racism? In some cases, I think that the answer to that was yes. It’s unfortunate, but one needs to wear big boy pants if they want to occupy the White House. Obama always seemed inclined to interpret criticism as racial and personal, even when it clearly wasn't. Did that influence the way that he treated honest opposition? I think the answer to that was yes. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Then there was the worst. Obama signed, in 2011, the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which authorized, for the first time, a sweeping indefinite detention program (no right to appear before a judge) for anyone deemed a terrorist, even American citizens. He issued a statement objecting to some of the language but signed it into law anyway to fend off Republican attacks in advance of the 2012 election.
Obama’s second term may be regarded as the period in which Hillary Clinton was being groomed as the next POTUS. Never mind problems with uncontrolled immigration, the quagmire in Afghanistan, the ongoing threats of terrorism, the Iran nuclear program, Syria, Russian aggression, the deficit, failing infrastructure, and an opioid crisis that decreased the life expectancies of Americans for the first time; the political focus was to follow up, as president, the first Black guy with the first White woman—a perfect early 20th-century progressive political script.
It did not matter to the elites and the media that ordinary Americans had their own ideas about this intended coronation, and they ignored plainly evident signs and portents that something was amiss underfoot: the Tea Party movement, the vociferous concerns over the size and scope of the federal government, clamorous dissatisfaction over uncontrolled immigration, and the rebellion against the illiberal foisting of what would become known as “wokeness” by arrogant progressives on the rest of the country.
So, the lessons from the second administration of the 21st century? Spending lots of money is a universal solution to all political problems. In politics, identity supersedes competence, honesty, and every other virtue. Bullshit is universal political camouflage. If you aren’t woke, you don’t count. Most everyone in flyover territory who isn’t completely down with progressivism is a deplorable. “We’d like to teach the world to sing” is our take on international diplomacy.
Heavy stuff. And the answer to it all came in 2016 by way of Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States.
About this development, you may think what you want, but Trump, a real estate magnate and media personality, was a result of frustration with professional politicians that made him, or some other populist figure, inevitable.
Without presidents Bush and Obama; without the arrogance of the political and media establishments in anointing Hillary Clinton without consulting voters; without 9/11, the Iraq War, and the 2007-08 financial crisis; without waves of illegal immigration; without crises of drugs, homelessness, and crime; and without financial fraud and wokeness, there wouldn’t have been an opening for someone like Trump—who’s a raised middle finger from Americans to the frauds and crooks in suits who’d run the country since the turn of the century.
Yo, professional politician, playing hardball to your benefit on our dime. Get a load of our guy. He’ll smoke you at your own game.
But Trump, being Trump, wore out his welcome after a single term. Now he was aided in this by Russian collusion, lawfare, and other tactics by the Democrats, the media and elements of the deep state. But he did his part as well. That begat this.
Joe Biden, a career politician, represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate for 36 years before serving as the 47th Vice President of the United States during the Obama administration and then becoming the 46th President of the United States in 2021. Biden’s entire presidential campaign, election and tenure in office were based on lies and illiberalism: Scranton Joe, wokeness, identity politics, Build Back Better, violations of the First Amendment, COVID obfuscation, the bullshitification of science for political purposes, and lawfare—capped by the greatest Weekend at Bernie’s scam ever pulled.
Then the Democrats, having learned nothing from their last attempt at coronating a president based on identity without consulting voters, offered up Kamala Harris. I’m still stunned about this. The only reason George W. Bush is the worst president of the 20th century is that Harris lost the 2024 election.
So, the lessons from the fourth administration of the 21st century? Spending lots of money is a universal solution to all political problems. In politics, identity supersedes competence, honesty, and every other virtue. If you aren’t woke, you’re MAGA. Lawfare, censorship and usurping the constitution are all in play, if that’s what it takes to save democracy. You can be in a vegetative state and still run the country via autopen. When you screw up in politics and have even a friendly Justice Department after you, you can sell paintings to get by.
Which led us back to:
Based on the last 25 years, it’s not really that surprising that we are where we are. I may not be down with what led us here, but I understand it.
After a quarter of a century of being lied to by the government, experts and the media; discovering indisputable evidence that the country is run by people who are either wildly incompetent or yearning for the fires of hell; watching deficit spending employed as a universal solution to all political problems; observing identity supersede competence, honesty, and every other virtue in much public life; watching bullshit reign supreme across the public sphere; discovering that if you aren’t woke, you’re nothing short of a MAGA deplorable; learning that our foundational ideals are a threat to our foundational ideals; and finally, realizing that one may exist in a vegetative state and still run the country via autopen, I think that a guy like Trump, who at least sometimes tells it like it is, is a breath of fresh air.
How could you not, for instance, like Trump’s speech at the U.N. this week, where he stared down hundreds of delegates and told them, essentially, that they were useless? I almost stood up and cheered. Of course later the same day he also told everyone that Tylenol causes autism.
Yeah, that’s completely stupid and unsupported by any evidence. But is it really any worse than the lies, deceit, and bullshit that got us here? The history is unfortunate, but understanding the problem is generally the first step in fixing it.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.