A World Record Presidency

 

Although the Nobel Prize for Peace has eluded Donald Trump thus far, proper recognition of his peacemaking abilities will certainly come eventually. In the meantime, I believe that his unprecedented achievements should be enumerated and recognized. I propose to seek the approval of that arbiter of the extraordinary, the Guinness World Records, for Trump’s supremacy in the following categories, only a sampling of the possibilities.

Largest number of high-ranking female administration officials, personally chosen, fired in one week.

See stories about Kimberly Ann Guilfoyle and Kate Sharon Zacharia. The tidbit that one announced the firing of the other cannot be encompassed in a category.

 

Most dollars taken in by a President. Subcategories: in one month; in one year; in an entire term. Amounts already qualify; total to be calculated in 2029.

 

Most dollars taken in by a President’s family.

This is a necessarily separate, but related category.

 

Most lies told as official statements.

Subcategories could be infinitely multiplied, so let’s settle for one total award. The Washington Post has done the work.

 

Most leading Black women verbally attacked, lifetime award.

See Lisa Cook, Letitia James, and Fani Willis.

Evidence for this category does not include the disproportionate loss of jobs by Black women due to Trump’s policies.

 

Most announcements that a war is over, while that war continues.

 

Most demands that immediate subordinates verbally attest to his greatness, per month during a presidency.

 

First demand in history that a rally audience makes the same claims.

 

Most rejections of lawsuits at the federal level.

Difficult to quantify, but clearly beyond any previous contestant.

 

Most physical destruction of federal property in a term.

 

Most physical destruction of the White House complex.

Important to make this a separate category.

 

Largest vote-buying proposal in world history.

$5000 per American adult would total more than one trillion dollars.

In consideration is a separate category for most vote-buying schemes at the state level.

 

Most significant prevention of wind power production.

There are no other contestants.

 

Most extensive use of gold paint in the Oval Office.

 

Most racist set of presidential policies.

More research must be done to verify that Trump deserves this award against other contenders, such as Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Johnson.

 

Most career expert appointees replaced by political supporters.

I’m just guessing here about a category that would be difficult to quantify. The Great Replacement goes on: see reporting by Dan Diamond in NYT October 21.

 

 

Some categories might not be appropriate for Guinness World Records, but the outstanding, even unique nature of Trump’s performance must be considered in any judgment about his world record presidency.

 

“The most regressive tax and budget legislation in modern American history.”

Quoted from a recent paper by Yale scholars Patrick Sullivan and Jacob S. Hacker, referring to the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

 

Most imperialist and aggressive policy against neighboring and allied lands in modern history.

This could be phrased as “largest number of new US states proposed by conquest”.

 

Nastiest presidential comments about federal judges.

Of course, judgments about the nastiness level of particular epithets are idiosyncratic. However, adding together the following: "Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge" about U.S. District Judge James Boasberg; “completely inept and embarrassing Court” and “fools and lapdogs” about Supreme Court justices, in particular, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who "sicken me"; “crazed lunatic” about U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes; and many others, creates an unbeatable record.

 

Largest drop in the outside world’s approval of America in one term.

Although this category is notoriously difficult to measure, its worldwide reach makes winning it a notable achievement. The drop in approval of the US across 20 countries from 54% in 2024 to 36% in 2026 demonstrates the global effects of Trump’s actions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd959q11g54o

 

Trump may not always be the best, but even second-place finishes add to his luster. Trump has the lowest approval rating at midterm since Harry Truman in 1946.

 

I hope that Trump’s well-known identity as a teetotaler will not prevent Guinness from recognizing his achievements.

 

One final category, to be held in abeyance until after November 3: Caused greatest electoral wipeout in American history.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

October 21, 2026

shochsta@ic.edu

Comeuppance

In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy seemed to wield unchecked power. McCarthy was antisemitic, persecuted people he alleged were homosexual, and defended Nazi soldiers who had massacred American prisoners at Malmedy. His political practice was defined by false accusations and Congressional investigation of his political enemies, mostly advocates of left-of-center ideas. 

In 1954, his authority was shattered by facts from the mouths of Army counsel Joseph N. Welch and Senator Stuart Symington. They followed the lead of Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, who, after she arrived in 1950, immediately denounced McCarthy’s debasement of the Senate into “a forum of hate and character assassination”. His ignominious downfall forever tainted McCarthy’s name.

McCarthy’s hatchet-man, Roy Cohn fell, too. Despite Donald Trump’s attempt to revive his reputation, Cohn’s could not be worse: Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark personify him as the “American Scoundrel”. McCarthy’s many enthusiastic supporters in both parties, however, including a young Richard Nixon in California, mostly escaped consequences by letting him fall.

Nixon seemed to have left that unpleasant past behind when he became President. But he retained the fantasy ideology about threats from within and a personality defined by vindictiveness. His heartless henchmen, Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman, oversaw the “Enemies List”, in which political opponents mixed with national figures from media and culture. Nixon used his considerable powers to target them for personal political purposes. His use of the petty criminality of the Plumbers to ensure his reelection in 1972 led to his plunge from the White House to pariah.

Haldeman and Erlichman went to jail and then disappeared into private lives of business success. But they too were forever tainted. When Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream put Erlichman in a TV ad in 1987, customers threatened to stop buying their product and the ad was dropped. Public opinion polls over the past 20 years consistently ranked Nixon worst among modern Presidents.

Years into his reign of corruption, lawlessness, greed, and inhumanity, Donald Trump still sits on his golden throne of seemingly unchecked power. His amazing capacity for turning colossal failures into fake news, which then became presidential policy, has created belief in too many Americans. But I see his comeuppance on the horizon. After ruling like a king in 2025, Trump’s power has cracked in 2026. Pointers to his fall from grace are piling up.

Trump has been fighting his conviction for assaulting Jean Carroll since 2023, but the Supreme Court rejected his appeals. Nearly twice as many Americans believe Carroll over Trump. The history of DOGE, which becomes fuller by the day, will be a central element of Trump’s eventual reckoning. Elon Musk’s claims of billions in savings turned out to be false. The government had to pay billions to employees for not working. Musk’s leadership of DOGE led to a collapse in the value of his company Tesla.

The never-ending war against Iran keeps pushing costs of fuel and daily necessities higher without achieving any of Trump’s asserted goals. Incompetence in major policies, such as relations with Canada, and petty issues, like the Reflecting Pool repairs, keep revealing the costs of Trump’s obsessions to America’s standing in the world.

The real details of Trump’s last 21 months in office are entering public consciousness in the first flurry of revelations. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan used inside sources to explain the workings of his corrupt, incompetent, vindictive, and anti-democratic administration. Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis described the vanquishing of the federal legal administration as Injustice. The careful NY Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall wrote, “President Trump’s corruption is unequaled by any previous resident of the White House.”

The federal descent into violent repression is over for now. ICE and its administrative leaders have pulled back in the face of determined popular resistance. The level of leadership just behind Trump has been decimated. The shared disgrace of Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and DHS more generally add to the mounting swell of failure and ignominy that is descending on Trump.

Trumps’ comeuppance is foreshadowed in his surging American unpopularity. The flood of pre-midterm polls may threaten our sanity and credulity, but they tell a clear story about how far Trump has fallen in the popular estimation. Republicans will be electoral losers, but by how much? No matter how many seats the Democrats gain, comeuppance will only come when political reality intrudes sufficiently on popular ideological dogma to energize enough Americans to express disgust at Trump’s administration.

As we approach the midterms, resistance to Trump is spreading through American society. Even formerly silent and loyal Republican politicians are speaking up, trying to salvage their threatened careers. Newsweek posted a “list” of Republican lawmakers who have expressed opposition to Trump policies, although it is notable for the half-hearted nature of that opposition.

Trump fears his future. His exhortation to the crowd in Dallas was an unprecedented presidential display of narcissism, dishonesty, and desperation: “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe . . . I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do”.

A very different Congress will exert power next year. Federal violence will be harder to organize. The moment for Trump’s next assault on our still mostly free system is soon. Whether he attempts another use of administration for violent unpopular ends may depend on our society’s readiness to stand up against his threats.

After he no longer wields official power, after his henchpeople decide to talk about what they know, after Trump is history, he will live in the dust bin. Neither Natalie Harp nor ALL-CAPS RANTS on Truth Social nor snipers on a tower taller than the Arc de Triomphe can save him now. MAGA is shrinking. Trump slinks into infamy. The facts sank McCarthy and Nixon. Facts will sink Trump. The technical incompetence, endless lies, weird obsessions, and personal corruption will add up to conclusions to be taught in public schools: Donald J. Trump will be ranked among the worst Presidents in 250 years.

History is not kind to bad men. Comeuppance is coming. The only uncertainty is when.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

Trump Unleashed

The extraordinary dominance of Donald Trump over the Republican Party, showcased by his resounding win in South Carolina and explained in the reporting of Lisa Lerer, is the salient political fact of this election season, offering us another 8 months of torture by news. The article’s teaser noted that Trump “shows no sign of being shaken from his controlling position in the G.O.P. — not in 2024, and not in the foreseeable future.”

Acolytes populate every Republican committee and organization from school boards to Congress, and sometimes dominate them. If they are not more numerous than those just willing to go along, they are much louder and scarier. The predictions about what a second Trump administration might do are indeed frightening. But what if he loses?

Biden might just edge Trump, leaving the partisan divisions and Republican dysfunction in Congress and state houses intact. Or sentiment might shift over these next long-winded months, as some Americans see reason and move away from Republicans as a Party, depriving the disruptors on the right of their power to do anything but scream.

That distinction might not matter, because Trump and his MAGA movement don’t care about the Republican Party outside of themselves. They define the non-MAGA half of the Party as RINOs. At every opportunity, Trump has been promoting his personal victimhood, not just predicting a fixed election, but proclaiming that the fix is already in place. He tells Black voters that he, like them, is suffering from discrimination. The long delayed judicial reckoning with his years of criminal behavior has been turned into “election interference” orchestrated by Joe Biden.

Millions of Americans, already credulous, are being primed to believe that any Trump defeat, close or landslide, must have been created by liberal treason, spread throughout government. They will be more ready for action than were Trump’s believers in 2021. They are more likely to be armed.

Only Trump himself could keep them under control. Given their levels of paranoid mistrust of anything that clashes with their beliefs, a televised Trump statement that he lost a fair election, grudgingly offered days later, would not be sufficient. Trump would have to implore his movement army to stay peaceful, because he really did lose and America goes on.

Is that likely? What would he do after that? Go back to real estate? Hit the New York clubs again? Golf endlessly?

There is no reason for a losing Trump not to encourage his followers’ social, political, economic, and virtual war against the “vermin” who are destroying America. I therefore foresee public violence, but I also believe it will be contained, as happened on January 6. I don’t dismiss the lasting repercussions of violence, however it turns out. Official Republican claims about “hostages” demonstrate the impossibility of any common narrative about that abundantly recorded and adjudicated event.

But below any eruption of violence lies a hot bubbling mass of despair, disbelief, distrust, shading into hatred. It is easier than ever before to bring a mass of angry people to one place and to direct them into action. We will not lack for people who seek personal gain by whipping up their passions. Marjorie Taylor Green, Kari Lake, Kristina Karamo, and hundreds of others at every level of government are not likely to urge Trump or their believers to accept reality, because unreason is their calling card.

I can’t imagine a defeated Trump fading into political unimportance. I think he will fully embrace his role as “proud political dissident” from above, safely ensconced in Mar-a-Lago, teaching ever wilder nightmares about our society to MAGA through TikTok and X. He would no longer be hemmed in by the need to appeal to any but his most idolatrous fans. Rules of governance, international treaties, American history, and the Constitution would all become irrelevant. The media personalities who have made their names by propping him up for years will continue to offer fake news to anyone who will listen. Trump could distort our American lives for another decade.

I hope Biden wins. I fantasize about a national awakening to the conviction that Trump needs to go and the Republican Party remade. But I read “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs as a child, so I’m careful what I wish for.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston, MA

May 1, 2024

Two Sides of Trump’s Mouth

Ever since January 6, 2021, Republicans have been trying to minimize the shameful events at the Capitol. The made-for-MAGA fantasies about antifa or secret FBI agents or other anti-Trumpers infiltrating the crowd and causing the violence have receded into the background of far-right conspiracy mongers.

More recently, Republicans embarrassed about January 6 have pivoted to denying that there was violence. During a 2023 CNN town hall, Trump described January 6 as a "beautiful day." The rioters have become “hostages”. Trump called for the release of “the J6 hostages” at a rally in Iowa in January, to the loud approval of the crowd.

However inappropriate it is to use popular sympathy for real hostages to win votes, that word is the logical conclusion of the Trump thought train. When Tucker Carlson spliced together a video collage that made January 6 look innocuous, and said, “These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Trump said it was “irrefutable” evidence that rioters have been wrongly accused of crimes. He called for the release from custody of people who were convicted or pled guilty in court.

That’s one side of Trump’s mouth, pointed towards the MAGA base that has an outsized influence on our politics. They apparently will believe anything, if he says it.

But Trump says other things. At the Supreme Court, where Trump’s personal political future is at stake, his lawyers cannot depend on fantasies. One of the key issues in Trump’s case is whether he should be prevented from running for President, because he aided an insurrection. Justice Ketanji Jackson asked Trump’s lawyer Jonathan Mitchell whether January 6 qualified as an insurrection. Mitchell thought it would weaken his argument, if he offered Trump’s campaign statements instead of the truth. He replied, "This was a riot. It was not an insurrection. The events were shameful, criminal, violent, all of those things, but did not qualify as an insurrection as that term is used in Section 3. What we said in our opening brief was President Trump did not engage in any act that can plausibly be classified as insurrection." An insurrection needs to be an "organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government of the United States through violence. This was a riot. It was not an insurrection.”

Even where truth matters most in our society, in courts of law, Trump is willing to spout fictions, castigate officers of the law, impugn judges, and repeat the same lies that got him convicted. I don’t think this speaks of rational calculation, but of preposterous narcissism and faith in the gullibility of his fans.

But more than he wants to inhabit the godlike persona he has cultivated for years, Trump wants to win. So his defenders at the Supreme Court admitted the obvious, implicitly calling Trump and other Republicans liars, so Trump could escape the label of “insurrectionist”.

Where truth matters, even in courts of law dominated by conservatives, Trump will speak the truth, or at least approach the truth, if it’s in his interest.

Will it matter that Trump tells two contradictory stories to suit his personal interests? Will American Jews who support any Republicans, thus support Republican talking points, thus the “hostage” rhetoric, admit that their political choices stoke antisemitism? Will they say out loud that Trump himself is an antisemite and thus not fit for American office? What more will it take?

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

March 7, 2024

Trump is not an Asshole. He’s Much Worse.

 

A few years ago, I explained in a video why I thought Trump was an asshole. Apart from any political issues, his treatment of other people exactly fitted the definition of asshole that our society developed as I grew up. I was hardly original: Trump has been called an asshole in the finest publications.

But I take it back.

The media deliberately portray assholes, fictional and real, because we apparently like to watch asshole behavior. Mostly they are harmless: annoying, disruptive, repulsive, and eventually sad creatures. But someone who steals your money, grabs your body, wants to put you in jail, and insults your religion or heritage, has gone beyond being an asshole.

Donald Trump is the most disgusting person in American public life. This has nothing to do with politics or policies. Nothing here is news. Individual elements are damning – the sum is a fatally flawed human being.

A central part of Trump’s business model is cheating people. He cheated workers across the country, hundreds of them, who had to sue him to get their pay. He cheated people who signed up for “Trump University”, and had to repay $25 million to former students.

Trump’s charity was a fake, a charity for him. He cheated poor children, Black college students, and many other needy people, including veterans trying to reenter civilian life through the Army Emergency Relief.

He used donors’ money to pay his debts, fund his campaign for President, and to buy a $10,000 painting of himself to display in one of his hotels. Another drop out of Trump’s bucket: he had to pay $2 million to the eight charities he cheated.

At a time when “thank you for your service” has become a nearly universal way of extending respect to past and present members of the armed forces, Trump repeatedly says, “I disdain your service.” His political disagreement in 2015 with John McCain led him to disparage the service of all men who had been captured, imprisoned, and sometimes tortured. “He’s not a war hero. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Even less worthy of respect in Trump’s eyes are those who didn’t survive. Trump accompanied his chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017 to visit the grave of Kelly’s son Robert, killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. Trump said to Kelly, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" Refusing to visit an American cemetery near Paris in 2018 in the rain, he expressed contempt for all dead soldiers: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump called the 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood “suckers”.

Trump is better than a veteran. He said that marching around at the New York Military Academy gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” He called the real military leaders in his administration “a bunch of dopes and babies” and “pussies”.

Who makes fun of someone who is disabled? Trump.

Who makes public fun of everyone he doesn’t like? Trump.

E. Jean Carroll is the first of a dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual assault to win a judgment against him: out goes another $83.3 million. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

How about his own daughter? His aides said Trump “regularly made lewd comments about his daughter Ivanka and fantasized about what it would be like to have sex with her.” Long before he ran for President, Trump said the same things to radio host Howard Stern. He told Stern that it was perfectly fine to refer to Ivanka as “a piece of ass” in 2004, chatted with Stern about about the size of her breasts in 2006.

Many people have performed the public service of collecting and numbering Trump’s lies. He has never stopped duping his supporters. In his New Hampshire victory speech, Trump said he’d won the state in 2016 and 2020, but Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both beat him there. Constant lying is a sin of small-mindedness, a personal reveal rather than a public danger, demonstrated by the unique George Santos.

A President’s lies could be dangerous, but Trump is far worse than a liar. His soul is unique in American public life. None of the radical right-wing Freedom Caucus, not even Marjorie Green, is close to as repellent a human as Trump.

A central American question disturbs and confuses me: why do so many American adults praise, support, donate to, and even worship such a worthless man?

Here is a possible answer. His supporters know Trump is awful. They can yell “fake news” all they want, but the truth about Trump stares everyone in the face. So they concoct stories about how liberals are even more horrible. How else to explain the ridiculous popularity in the MAGA world of the Pizzagate claim that the Clintons were running a pedophile ring in Washington, DC? Even more popular is its crazier spawn, QAnon: “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation”. A majority of Republicans believed this about their country and the rest of us in 2020. In late 2023, another survey showed that 29% of Republicans are now QAnon believers. When Trump describes politicians and people who oppose him as “vermin”, he offers supporters a lifeline: you know how awful I am, but our enemies (meaning most Americans) are much worse.

QAnon is especially believed by less educated Republicans. What about the most politically educated, the leadership of the Republican Party? Republican office holders across the country are making the same deal: we’ll be silent about Trump’s obvious unfitness, if we can keep our jobs.

Imagine at the first Republican presidential debate this past August that seven of the candidates on stage, leaving out, say, Vivek Ramaswamy, each declared Donald Trump personally unfit to serve, and said that they rejected his serial adultery, business cheating, constant lying, and sexual assaults. Imagine that seven said that Trump’s illegal attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election was sufficient alone to disqualify him as a candidate and as a Republican.

None of them had to disagree with any of Trump’s policies. They only had to talk about his personal human failures. It may have taken a while for the MAGA adherents to recognize the depth of their delusions. Some Republican leaders who declared Trump a national danger might suffer politically. But what a public service to America and Americans.

If Trump is guilty above all of always putting himself in front of country, what about the leading Republicans who are racing to fall in line? Aren’t they guilty of the same moral flaw?

Steve Hochstadt