Trump still has consequences, none of them good

I’d like to forget about Donald Trump. It is certainly a blessing that those of us who think him a disloyal jerk don’t have to put up with his constant media presence, now that he is out of office. But his years in the White House have consequences. None of them good.

Let’s start at home. The prevalence of COVID-19 infections is looking increasingly like a map of voter preferences in the last presidential election, with the former Confederacy and some Western states suffering the most.

This is not surprising. Trump discouraged social distancing and vaccination, though he was himself was quietly careful to do both. The Delta variant is therefore finding lots of host humans in areas that voted for him. Some will die. More will infect others, including people whose immune systems don’t allow them to be vaccinated as well as children not yet permitted to be vaccinated. The result could be an even more infectious variant popping up, with devastating consequences not only for public health but also for the economy. If you are unvaccinated against COVID-19 and haven’t had polio or smallpox, maybe you should be thinking about why not.

Do I need to spell it out? No one has had polio or smallpox in the US for decades. Because vaccines.

The slow start of vaccination in poorer countries is also in part a result of Trump’s presidency. He wasn’t interested in supporting the World Health Organization’s COVAX program to get them vaccines. Beggar they neighbor and America First are essentially the same thing. The trouble of course is that this, too, contributes to the likelihood of more virulent variants evolving. Yes, evolving: for those who don’t believe in evolution, the existence of COVID-19 variants due mutations should give you pause.

But Trump’s impact on world affairs is unfortunately not limited to COVID-19. Iran is now much closer to having all the material it needs for nuclear weapons than it was when Trump in 2018 withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal. So close, that the newly elected hardline President Raisi is thinking about not reentering it. The Supreme Leader is hinting at that possibility as well, while the Americans have resorted to saying the moment to do so is passing. If you live in one of those states with high COVID infection rates, maybe you are happy about that, because Trump convinced you it was a bad deal. But no deal is clearly worse.

Another sad consequence of Trump’s time in office is the current situation in Syria. He needs to share the blame with Barack Obama, but the fact is neither president ever figured out what to do in Syria other than kill the Islamic State. Andrew Tabler gives an interesting account of Trump Administration thinking on the subject, but he is unable to come up with more than a generic wish for what needs to be done:

A new Syria policy must be carefully calibrated to avoid getting mired in bureaucracy and competing interests. The Biden administration should appoint a special envoy for Syria charged with developing what the Trump team never did—a coherent political strategy, supported by the U.S. intelligence community, to isolate Assad and his regime’s facilitators and limit the malign influence of Iran and Russia. 

The fact is that Assad, supported by Iran and Russia, has closed down options other than himself and reduced the Americans and Europeans to begging for humanitarian border crossings so they can provide relief to the millions of Syrians who remain outside Assad’s control, thereby preventing a new flood of refugees. While the Trump Administration finished Obama’s “kill ISIS” project, it did nothing thereafter to stabilize the situation and begin to provide something more than humanitarian relief outside Assad-controlled areas. The result of course is that ISIS is resurging, or at least regrowing.

The situation isn’t much better in other parts of the world. While Biden is understandably trying to keep his focus on the big picture of strategic competition with Russia and China, North Korea has more nuclear weapons and more capability to deliver them to the continental US than ever before. The love letters with Trump never accomplished anything. Nicholas Maduro still holds power in Venezuela, despite much Trump Administration blah-blah about replacing him. The Communist regime in Cuba is looking shaky at the moment, but it survived Trump’s tightening of the embargo and isn’t yielding to protests yet.

The House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection started its hearings this week with testimony from four law enforcement officers who tried to defend the Capitol. They asked the Committee to find out who was behind the attack, that is who “hired the hitman.” It is important to get an official answer to that question. But we know who it was. Donald Trump called for the attack on the Capitol and expected it to encourage the Congress to reject the results of the Electoral College vote, or even to prevent it from certifying the Electoral College result. It will take the United States a long time to emerge from the shadow Trump has cast over its history.

Trump still has consequences. None of them good.