2017-2020: Well That Could Have Been Worse

I don’t want to be that guy, but honestly, I feel those Trump years could have been worse.
They weren’t great, obviously. Not as as good as they would have
been if the President had been, say, a random person you pulled off the street. With
a random person, you’d have good odds of drawing someone who wasn’t a narcissistic
liar with no sense of empathy. So that would be better.

Given the person we did have, I think we got out of that one okay. By “we,” I mean
the world. And that’s mainly because Trump didn’t really care about the rest of
the world: He was all about America First. I really thought Trump
would be unable to resist invading another country, since that’s an excellent,
time-proven way to reap some personal benefits while pushing the costs onto other
people, a tactic businesspeople especially enjoy. Somewhere around half of all business
activity, in my opinion, is about genuinely creating value, while the other half is
about gaming the system in order to capture profits while pushing costs onto
somebody else.

One of the most shocking things I ever saw was the US after 9/11 transforming into a
scary militaristic vengeance machine with no patience for concepts that had previously
seemed to be core values, like tolerance and dissent. That
was disturbing: watching TV networks and newspapers line up behind the White House like
good soldiers, and cheerlead the invasion of an unrelated country.
So I’m happy Trump didn’t try to lead a return to that.

Instead, all his enemies were domestic,
and he attacked them so crudely and blatantly that they were able to rally and defend
themselves, and may even be able to grow back stronger, like an immune system after an inoculation.
I’ve always liked how Americans have so many principles, or at least lay claim to them—not
at all like Australians, who will roll with whatever seems to make the most practical
sense at the time—and 2017-2020 was a great time for putting principles to the test,
and finding out who had them, and what they really were.

Therefore, I have to say, as someone who half-expects the world to fall into a corpo-anarchist
apocalypse any day now, that definitely could have been worse. I didn’t like the
2017 tax cuts (more inequality, bringing forward the
day when the common people begin guillotining the capital classes), the COVID bungling,
and the continued breeding of alt-right brain viruses, which don’t just affect the US
but also get exported to the rest of the world and spawn things like this:

Kelly Barnes/AAP Image

But nobody got nuked, no-one got sucked into an international conflict that will
drag on for ten years, and we all got a good look at what’s actually happening in
social media, which might have otherwise bubbled away quietly until it was permanently
entrenched.

So that’s pretty good.