Paul Ryan meets with Donald Trump and Mike Pence on Capitol Hill after their election. Public Domain.
A bare couple of months after Trump’s inauguration, he is already being widely touted as the worst president in US history. His bombast, splenetic tweets, unsavoury remarks about women, and scapegoating of minorities provide plenty of ammunition for opponents to vilify the new leader of the free world. Moreover he has had the temerity - no other word suffices - to assault the media for disseminating fake news, a risky activity even for so powerful a figure as the president. They have responded in kind by spearing some of Trump’s outlandish misstatements and, more significantly, by doing their best to undermine his senior cabinet nominations and to suggest that either he or his cronies or both are engaging in covert skulduggery with Russia and its supposedly villainous leader Vladimir Putin. One of the ironies of this spat is that while the president’s “alternative facts" are easily spotted and readily seized upon as evidence of his flakiness, the long, continuing and disgraceful story of media lying passes largely without comment. Where fake news is concerned, Trump is in diapers compared with mainstream media.
Will Trump prove to be the disaster that many predict? No one can yet tell. To date we have mostly his words on which to pass judgement. However, if he is to surpass his recent predecessors in deception, brutality and damage to the international standing of the United States, then he has a way to travel.
