Donald Trump treated the country as badly as he treated E. Jean Carroll

From a conservative vantage point, the record shows Trump was a bad president. Take Trump’s signature issue of illegal immigration. The ultra-progressive Barack Obama presided over a significant reduction in Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal immigrants in the final three years of his term, from 486,651 to 415,816. Trump, in contrast, made almost no progress in this regard from year two (404,142) to year four of his presidency (405,651), and also presided over an explosion in crossings during his third year (to 854,501). (I excluded the first year of each term because administrations overlap in January, and policy changes take a while to implement.) Trump shut down the government for a record 35 days, wreaking havoc on taxpayers looking for IRS help, over the single issue of wall funding. His battle amounted to one of the worst negotiations in history — in the end, he secured less wall funding, at $1.3 billion, than the $1.6 billion Democrats had themselves offered in the beginning. Meanwhile, taxpayers shelled out $9 billion in back pay for federal employees, half of that for work that wasn’t being done. On Trump’s other favorite issue, the trade deficit was higher each year under Trump than it was in every single year under Obama. Manufacturing jobs actually rose by 386,000 in Obama’s second term, but the U.S. had lost manufacturing jobs under Trump even before the pandemic hit. Likewise, Trump’s diplomacy, apart from Israeli affairs, was a disaster. He negotiated with the Taliban directly and released 5,000 vicious prisoners while committing the U.S. to a precipitous pullout from Afghanistan. He gave the Russians a major foothold in Syria while abandoning a U.S. base and huge stores of American supplies. He embarrassed the free world by kowtowing to North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un and saying he “fell in love” with the murderous nut-job. And he committed U.S. prestige to regime change in Venezuela, only to fail spectacularly. And that’s just a partial listing of Trump’s abject policy and political failures. In sum, Trump is liable for battery — not just against E. Jean Carroll, but against the whole U.S. body politic. New Orleans native Quin Hillyer is a senior commentary writer and editor for the Washington Examiner, working from the Gulf Coast. This column originally appeared in the Examiner. He can be reached at Qhillyer@WashingtonExaminer.com. His other columns appear at www.washingtonexaminer.com/author/quin-hillyer. https://www.nola.com/opinions/quin_hillyer/quin-hillyer-donald-trump-treated-the-country-as-badly-as-he-treated-e-jean-carroll/article_0df647de-f0f0-11ed-af87-6f24043376a0.html