Trump's Alleged Crimes Are Just the Tip of His Legacy

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-alleged-crimes-771181/

December 19, 2018 1:38PM ET
Trump’s Alleged Crimes Are Just the Tip of His Legacy
The real enduring harm will come from his administration’s policy decisions
By Jamil Smith

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From exacerbating climate change to the slowly-but-surely regressing economy that now feels the weight of his unnecessary tax cuts to heartless immigration policies that have destroyed lives, these will be the real lasting legacy. Earlier this month, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who migrated to the United States with her father, died while she was in Customs and Border Patrol custody. She didn’t receive emergency medical care for 90 minutes after showing symptoms of severe dehydration, and hospital officials said that Caal Maquin likely died of sepsis shock.

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Provided that Trump finishes his term in office before losing in 2020, we’ll never get back the four years that we spent watching him willfully speed up climate change or wreck Obama-era policies designed to promote equality in areas like housing and education. Gone forever are the years and lives lost while Trump mishandles Afghanistan, Niger and Yemen, among other war theaters. We’ll never get back the talent that would have been brought to our country by the immigrants he’s repelled with his laws and rhetoric. The person who Jakelin would have become, had she been given asylum and a chance to grow up here, is lost.

The government won’t get its time back, either. Trump’s reckless appointments of amateurs to Cabinet offices and judgeships will have consequences that outlive this administration. They even will outlive Trump himself, unless the nation decides that its systemic issues are not inherently partisan, but instead national weaknesses that we need to get more serious about.



Lewis is correct, and it would be to our benefit if Trump’s abuses of power led Americans to examine anew how much we need government to be competent, expert and efficient. But even despite our experience with Nixon, we have no idea how to rebound from having a know-nothing crook in the White House. It sounds simple: elect someone who is fundamentally everything Trump is not — an intelligent, empathetic and experienced person willing to use government powers to challenge and repair an unfair system, not to exploit it to conceal illegal and incompetent actions. That may quickly rectify the damage to the presidency’s veneer, but it would merely be plastic surgery for a disfigured office.

This isn’t about some saccharine notion of national healing. Remedying a country scarred by Trump will require a revolutionary mindset, and that thinking is already late. Just as the world’s economies must make some radical pivots to stem the effects of climate change, American culture must also undergo some exhaustive modifications if we are ever to get right. The worst things that Trump has done don’t violate our laws so much as they penetrate the open wounds that were already there. I don’t know if it national civics lessons fix that, but it wouldn’t be a bad place to start.