Per John Brennan: Trump most ignorant, incompetent individual to hold presidency
True or false?
John Brennan: Trump most ignorant, incompetent individual to hold presidency
Oh, this is very true. The closest I can think of was Grover Cleveland (Democrat). Popular opinion at the time was broadly hostile to his Administration's course on the domestic and Foreign Policy levels. Cleveland spent his Presidency ignoring America's identity and history of creating and safeguarding American trade throughout the world, and persistently argued for isolationism.
- He hated that blacks had rights in the South, thus betraying the Declaration of Independence, the gains of the Civil War, and the 14th Amendment.
- He hated national expansion, thus bucking the accepted theme of Manifest Destiny, and refused to allow the annexation of Hawaii.
- He was publicly against the bi-partisan build-up of a modern Navy, declaring that such a thing was "not consistent with the early policy" of the republic. This was ignorant, considering that the early policy of the republic involved building a navy to fight Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean to protect our trade.
- He abandoned several trade and reciprocity agreements; and routinely insisted to foreign leaders that the Monroe Doctrine "did not establish any protectorate by the United States over other American states." This was a clear contradiction to the globally understood document, and moved Britain to act in Venezuela.
- He refused to get involved with Cuba's struggle for independence against Spain, leaving Spain to do as it pleased, until widespread criticism across the country forced him to act against Spain, which mostly involved pleading and fruitless deal-making until the revolutionaries in Cuba won.
- He dispatched federal troops to Illinois during the Pullman Strike of 1894, over the objections of the state's Governor, which was also in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, created just sixteen years earlier.
Throughout his Presidency, Democrats and Republicans criticized Cleveland's isolationists foreign policy as weak and in retreat; and so much of it was based on an ignorance of his own country's history. His weakening of American identity, the Pullman Strike, along with the depression at the time, shifted the political landscape. The 1894 elections produced the largest reversal of congressional political strength in American history. Cleveland's Democrats lost 113 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate; and there were rebellions in the Party ranks by 1895. Despite Republicans coming out on top of Cleveland's fiasco, both political parties were alarmed when a million and a half voters across the nation chose populists to represent them.
....but that was before Donald Trump, the current ignorant idiot who bases all policy decisions on personal ego and a quest to please a minority of voters who don't even care.
