With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Max Boot is fed up with Donald Trump

We are not yet 100 days into the Trump presidency, but already the president has clocked one unenviable milestone after another. It’s all too easy to take for granted the broken norms that characterize this administration. So it’s important to pause and consider just how unprecedented the craziness has been. Herewith, a partial list of the myriad ways in which Donald Trump has already gone where no president has gone before.

He is the first president to:

• Be elected with the help of a hostile foreign power. The U.S. intelligence community released a unanimous assessment on Jan. 6 that concluded that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” and that Putin “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

• Be investigated by the FBI for possible collusion with that same hostile foreign power. FBI Director James B. Comey has confirmed that his agents are looking into “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”

• So fulsomely express admiration for a Russian dictator — Trump has praised Putin for being “very smart,” “strong” and a real “leader,” while dismissing any concerns about Putin’s numerous human rights violations by saying, “You think our country is so innocent?”

• Lie so regularly and brazenly, and often about matters, such as the size of his inauguration crowds, that are of little consequence. PolitiFact reports that only 17% of Trump’s statements are “true” or “mainly true,” with the rest ranging from “half true” to “pants on fire.”

• Accuse his predecessor of “Watergate/Nixon” crimes by supposedly putting a “tapp” on his phones, and to then be publicly called out on his lies by his own FBI and National Security Agency directors, who testified that they know of no evidence that President Obama tapped Trump. ...

Read entire article at The Los Angeles Times