Donald Trump Has Been Even Worse Than Everyone Expected | HuffPost Latest News

When Donald Trump kicked off his presidential bid in 2015, he rode down a golden escalator in Trump Tower, using the media attention to promote his own brand and property. He lied. He made racist comments. And he exaggerated the crowd size.

In other words, he showed exactly the type of president he would become.

The rest of his campaign was no different. He continued to stoke racial tensions, bully and demean.

Unable to believe that he could truly be as bad as he presented himself, some Democrats thought maybe Trump would change once in office. Maybe there would be a way to work with him. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said there were areas where Trump voiced very progressive and populist opinions , and perhaps those would be areas of cooperation.

I dont think it makes sense to say, No, were not gonna work in any way in any form with the Trump administration, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said at the time.

The late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) was one of the few Democratic members willing to call Trump out and speak forcefully against him. Even before Trumps inauguration, Lewis said he was not a legitimate president . Some Democrats supported Lewis, but plenty distanced themselves from him and said he had gone too far.

Meanwhile, top Republican leaders, when asked about Trumps rampant dishonesty during the course of the campaign, offered assurances that a Trump presidency would be different. They said the burdens of the Oval Office would weigh on him, and hed have a competent team of aides. The Trump White House, they said, would function like most others.

I think many Republicans who held their nose and voted for Trump in 2016 thought he would at least be surrounded by seasoned staffers and career Republicans who would provide the policy road map for the administration, said Jennifer Pierotti Lim, the co-founder of Republican Women for Progress, who endorsed Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. But as weve seen, Republicans have abdicated their responsibility and instead of putting our country first, they have elevated Trumpism in all its forms.

Trump has been exactly the man he presented himself to be during the campaign, if not worse. He largely abandoned his populist promises to pursue the same trickle-down economic policies that are standard GOP fare. He has continued to make racist and sexist remarks and pursue those sorts of policies and has used the presidency to enrich himself and his family.

Various Democrats told HuffPost that Trump has indeed been worse than they expected.

I thought he would be not just focusing on [infrastructure] but sustain the focus, would be in communities talking about just bridges, for example, said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.). I thought he would use the opportunity to try to help rebuild the country. I thought he missed a big opportunity. Of course, I never thought he would abuse his power the way he did.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said he expected Trump to at least try to get bipartisan agreement on some matters.

He just wasnt interested in that at all, Tester said. It surprised me.

The lack of bipartisanship has been laid bare in the past few weeks as Trump, with the full support of Senate Republicans, has tried to push through Amy Coney Barrett to replace liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. The vote is likely to come just one week before the election, although Republicans protested when President Barack Obama tried to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia months before the 2016 election.

Trump personally lied about the size of his inauguration crowd on his first full day in office, standing before a memorial to agents killed in the line of duty at CIA headquarters. His press secretary repeated and embellished the lie later that afternoon, and the tone was set for the coming four years.

To date, Trump has made tens of thousands of false statements, about matters great and small. A significant percentage of them have been lies: things that he has been told were false but that he repeated anyway, such as his claim that he signed into law the Veterans Choice Act, or that his tax cuts were the largest in American history.

If you look back to the 2016 campaign, every warning we made about Trumps unique badness has seemingly come true but its not enough to just say I told you so. Voters have to be shown the math, said Ian Sams, who served as a spokesperson for Clintons presidential campaign. Sadly, these past four years and especially the 2020 pandemic have revealed too clearly the depth of Trumps fraudulent pitch as a tough, problem-solving leader, and most Americans now see him for the failure he is.

In many ways, Trump has turned out to be the worst version of what people feared. He has separated immigrant children from their parents, emboldened white supremacists, flattered strongmen who run dictatorships and treated the presidency like his own private business.

I often say there [were] many shocks but there was never a surprise, said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2016.

The consequences of his incompetence have been deadly. He may not have known the coronavirus was coming, but he could have been better prepared. And his inability, or unwillingness, to shepherd the country through the crisis has made his presidency even worse than some of his critics feared, as the death toll from the coronavirus rises to more than 220,000 Americans.

A look at the some of the ways Trump has exceeded expectations on just how low hed go:

Separating Families And Decimating Legal Immigration

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