Assessment of the Damage
Even if Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris win on November 3, Trump can still do an enormous amount of damage after the election on top of what has already been done.
If Vice President Biden is inaugurated on January 20, 2021, he and (hypothetical) Vice-President-elect Harris will have an even tougher repair job than President Obama did when he first was sworn in.
Let’s assess the damage.
State of the Federal Government Itself
The federal government is made up of myriad agencies that do vital work, such as inspecting drugs and food, managing interstate commerce, policing the police, collecting data on vital issues, managing our overseas relationships, and taking care of national security.
The vast majority of these agencies and departments are either becoming gravely understaffed or running dangerously low on money. In many of these departments, morale is at rock bottom because of maltreatment by the Trump administration, incompetence from his appointees, and a lack of direction. Many of these agencies, such as the FDA, CDC, and the State Department, have lost credibility thanks to actions taken by the Trump administration.
The Justice Department has taken the most damage to its credibility thanks to Barr misusing the department as Trump’s personal law firm and, worse, utilizing it to commit treason. It would be foolish to trust the Justice Department right now.
Add the United States Postal Service to the list of casualties under the Trump administration.
The only part of the federal government that is working even remotely well right now is ICE and the US Border Patrol. Both of their unions endorsed Trump in 2016. This means that they were not just following orders.
They wanted to carry out crimes against humanity on Trump’s behalf.
All in all, the federal government bureaucracies are severely damaged, possibly beyond repair. It will take someone of Biden’s caliber just to have a chance to repair the damage.
But we are just getting started.
Congress (Federal House of Representatives and Senate)
Let’s be clear: polarization in Congress was a serious problem long before Trump crashed onto our national political landscape. When the Tea Party took over the GOP after Democrats won up and down the ballot in 2008 and after Democrats took a shellacking during the 2010 midterms, the Republican Party as an institution began to block legislation for its own sake.
But today’s Republican Party will do absolutely anything to get power and absolutely anything to hurt people they perceive as their political enemies. Trump has acted as both an accelerant and a symptom in this regard—bedsores, so to speak.
For a while, Senator McConnell made the Senate so toxic to work in that Democrats were having trouble finding quality recruits (fortunately, that problem has been solved). The majority leader from Kentucky has even bragged about being a “grim reaper” for any type of useful legislation passed in the House.
Worst of all, the Republicans in Congress in both chambers have shown they are willing to tolerate lawbreaking so long as their people are doing it or it benefits them. If you don’t believe me, look at the fact that they were prepared to acquit Trump of blatant corruption in so many ways.
QAnon, despite bipartisan condemnation (though one was only genuine), will eventually take over the Republican Party the way the Tea Party did. The Republican Party as it exists today is now a personality cult.
Don’t take it from me, take it from an actual Republican operative.
If Trump loses in 2020, Biden will still have to deal with a Republican Party that is more dangerous, more deranged, and more unhinged than ever—not to mention wounded. In American politics, few forces are more dangerous than a political movement that is traumatized from a brutal defeat eager to strike back.
This will make tackling the four biggest crises of our time even more difficult, crises that Trump has only made worse thanks either to his cruelty or incompetence.
Economic Crisis
The stock market reached record highs after a historic crash … in 1933.
The point is that the stock market is not a good measure of how the real economy is doing, only how Wall Street thinks it is doing.
Truth be told, the economic crisis we are in makes the 2008 recession look mild. Unemployment is still at historic highs, small businesses are hurting badly, state and local governments are facing a budgetary crisis thanks to rising expenses and falling revenue, millions of Americans are facing eviction, and food bank lines are longer than ever.
This is to say that the economy is not performing well at all.
If Vice President Biden wins, he will inherit an economy in even worse shape than the one he inherited in 2009. Not helping matters is the fact that as long as COVID-19 is raging, life cannot return to normal, and that means the economy cannot recover.
COVID-19 will determine if we can bounce back economically or not.
Which leads nicely to the…
Public Health Crisis
As of writing, more than 185,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States alone. We have had more than 6 million cases.
To put that in perspective, that is more than three times as many Americans who died during the Vietnam War—but in the current crisis, it is only in six months.
To say that the United States has failed catastrophically when it comes to COVID-19 would be the understatement of the century.
The federal government’s entire reason for existing is to help states coordinate jobs the states alone cannot do. Yet the Trump administration was so useless (at best) that states had to form regional compacts to coordinate containment, testing, and reopening.
To be fair, some states have done quite well. Washington State and Oregon come to mind. Several leaders at both the state and local levels took this crisis seriously from the outset, and it shows. Sadly, so many leaders have not. The sky-high death rate in Texas, Florida, and Arizona are a testament to this fact.
COVID-19 will still be raging after November 3 regardless of who wins. The dependent variable on how much longer it will rage will be if Biden or Trump is victorious.
But COVID-19 is far from the only natural disaster the country is facing.
Climate Crisis
For readers living on the West Coast, you are already feeling the effects of climate change. The wildfires are getting bigger, hotter, and far more dangerous.
We are seeing the damage in Minnesota as well. Our summers are getting longer and hotter, our winters shorter but far more brutal.
As the effects of climate change continue to accelerate, natural disasters will get worse and worse.
In the long run, climate change is arguably the biggest threat to the United States and the world at large. We are rapidly losing land on which to grow food, the ice caps are disappearing at a rapid pace. At this rate, Florida is going to be underwater soon.
The natural disasters affecting the United States are going to become more and more severe. State and local governments are going to have to budget more for disaster relief.
Needless to say, the Trump administration has only made the problem worse with his efforts to revive the dying coal industry, withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement, and going out of his way to ignore climate change as well.
If Biden wins in November, he is going to inherit a world more unstable than ever thanks to climate change.
But the effects of climate change are not and will not be equitably felt.
That is because of…
Crisis of Racism/Institutionalized White Supremacy
All of the crises above have and will hit people of color, black people especially, hardest.
This problem has been with this country since day one. It is not just reflected in the fact that a white terrorist was permitted to murder two people with an assault rifle by the Kenosha Police Department and yet this same police department shot a black man in the back seven times.
It is also reflected in the Minneapolis Police Department, responsible for the murder of George Floyd, a department notorious for its racism, brutality, and general incompetence (the Minneapolis City Government as a whole needs drastic changes—but that is for another time).
In every aspect of life in America is the legacy of racist decisions and policies, past and present. The quality of health care, education, housing, and other public services you receive still largely depends on skin color and what you look like.
What is more, Trump has let loose the worst of America’s demons.
To be clear, the demons of institutionalized white supremacy, blood and soil ideology, and White Nationalism have always been with the United States. But Trump has given them a free rein to do whatever they want.
What they want is civil war, mass death, and destruction.
If Biden wins on November 3, he will have to deal with the legacies of these decisions to clean up as much as possible, and he will have to deal with two groups of people I absolutely loathe.
The Far Left and the Far Right
Ever since the 2016 election, I have seen the far left and the far right in many ways as two sides of the same coin: white guys around my age (I am twenty-four) who are itching for a civil war or revolution without any understanding of what that actually entails.
Fortunately, I don’t have any white supremacists in my social circles, so I don’t have much experience dealing with the boogaloo people, militia members, or other bloodthirsty far-right terrorists.
Unfortunately, I have plenty of experience with people who think a revolution or a civil war from the left would be a lot of fun or would be good for the country. For example, many of my friends on Facebook have gone out of their way to say riots produce useful results (social science research shows they don’t) and go out of their way to ignore the devastation riots bring to marginalized people.
What is worse, these are the same people who betrayed Secretary Clinton in 2016 and helped bring Trump into office.
Truth be told, I don’t hate Antifa and the far left because they engage Nazis in street fights. I hate them because so many of them helped get Trump elected by voting third party (or otherwise throwing away their vote), not voting out of a sense of entitlement (I can forgive those who were actively blocked from voting via voter suppression), or even voting for Trump in an idiotic attempt to speed up the revolution. They are far less effective than the far right, but I still feel the knife wound in my back.
If Vice President Biden wins, he will have to contend with a far-right movement thirsty for civil war and rapidly gaining power while managing a far-left movement that is poorly organized but so keen for a revolution that they will work with Nazis in order to make it happen.
Final Assessment
If Vice President Biden and Senator Harris win on November 3, they will have a monumental repair job to do for the United States in every sense of the word. Even public servants—as accomplished as they are—cannot do such a Herculean task alone. If they win, we all must help heal a gravely ill country.
I will have another post ready about what ails the country exactly, but for now, don’t expect an overnight fix to four years of arson.
If Trump wins, all of the crises above snowball.
Four more years of this, and I doubt the United States of America will survive as we know it.