Politics

Trump 2024: Why The Ex-President Should Never Be Allowed Within 1,000 Feet of the White House Again

If you or someone you know still needs convincing, allow us.
Donald Trump
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If you’re reading this, then you probably already know: Donald Trump is officially running for president for a third time, having announced the news at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night. As he is one of just a handful of ex-presidents to run again after losing reelection, there aren’t a lot of historical parallels for this. But it would kind of be like the bubonic plague announcing a comeback and expecting people to be happy about it. Or finding out your Stage IV rectal cancer had returned, after nearly killing you the first time. Or the worst president in modern history, the one who incited a violent coup because his ego is so fragile he couldn’t admit he’d lost, deciding to take another stab at terrorizing the nation for another four years. Something like that!

Does Trump actually have a shot at winning? On the one hand, his longtime pals in the conservative media seemingly abandoned him after the midterms in favor of Ron DeSantis, and a recent poll gave the Florida governor a slight edge over the ex-president. On the other hand, the fact that he has a greater than 0% chance of making it back to the White House should terrify everyone in this country, as well as the people living in the countries he’d probably drop a bomb on given the chance—and considering the 74,223,369 who voted for him last time, including those who have publicly stated he’s a danger to society but would nevertheless still vote for him again, his odds are clearly a lot higher than that. 

In short, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, this news has no doubt caused you to panic, driven you to drink, or ripped through your stomach like a batch of bad oysters shucked by Mr. Mar-a-Lago himself, who you know ignores the “employees must wash hands before returning to work” sign. To be clear, given the circumstances, these are appropriate responses.

But maybe you still need convincing. Or maybe you know a person who knows a person who still needs convincing. Whatever your situation, the following is a list of some of the many reasons why Donald Trump should never be allowed inside the White House again. Not even as a guest! Not even as a school trip chaperone standing quietly and respectfully in the back. It doesn’t include literally every reason, seeing as our fingers would break off before we could get through every single one. But for anyone wondering if it would really be that bad, it should be enough to convince them that yes, it would really be that fucking bad.

The Whole Insurrection Business

Remember the time Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and then spent months baselessly insisting it had been stolen from him, lies that culminated in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that left multiple people dead? You should, because (1) it only happened 18 months ago, and (2) the congressional committee investigating the events leading up to the attack spent several months this year airing its findings in a very public fashion. Some of those findings have included that Trump sent his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, knowing they were armed; that he physically assaulted a Secret Service agent when he was told he couldn’t participate in the events at the Capitol; and that he suggested that the then vice president of the United States, Mike Pence, deserved the chants calling for him to be hanged because he refused to violate the Constitution and block the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. Also, according to January 6 committee vice chair Liz Cheney, there is evidence that members of Team Trump have engaged in witness tampering. (Witness tampering, just so it’s clear, is illegal. And speaking of illegal, whether or not he’s actually indicted, Trump very likely committed felonies when he tried to overturn the election, according to federal judge David Carter.) Trump and his allies have insisted that all of this is much ado about nothing, but, in fact, it all makes for a very good reason why he should never be allowed to be POTUS again—particularly given the fact that he doesn’t regret any of it.

The Classified-Documents Matter

On August 8, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s for-profit resort and residence, and found numerous classified documents in the basement storage room and in Trump’s office. Why is this bad? Well, because of the aforementioned part about them being classified—and in some cases “top secret”—in addition to the fact that the government had told him to turn them over on several prior occasions. Instead of handing the documents over, Team Trump lied about having the extremely sensitive material—some of which reportedly detailed a foreign government’s nuclear capabilities—and potentially obstructed justice. All of this is currently under criminal investigation by the Justice Department, and at least one person thinks Trump could be convicted of “multiple felonies.”

The Thing About His Being an Abject Racist and Massive Bigot

Examples of Trump being an out-and-out racist and huge bigot could fill several books. They include but are in no way limited to:

  • Telling four congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” despite the fact that three of those women “came from” the U.S. and the other was a U.S. citizen
  • Tweeting a picture of Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of cash next to the Star of David and writing, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”
  • Banning travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the U.S.
  • Pardoning a guy who the Justice Department said oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history
  • Reportedly calling reporters, at the height of the AIDs crisis “to inquire if people he had met with might be gay—concerned because they had exchanged a handshake
  • Throwing a total shit fit over the removal of a statue of a Confederate general who thought Black people should be white people’s property
  • Reportedly telling a biracial woman he was dating that she’d gotten her beauty from her Black mother and her intelligence “from her dad, the white side”
  • Claiming that a group that included neo-Nazis had some “very fine” people among it
  • Suggesting Jews control the media
  • Suggesting that Jews only care about money
  • Reportedly calling white supremacists “my people
  • Starting an entire movement around the lie that the country’s first Black president wasn’t born here
  • Calling for the execution of five Black and Latino teenagers
  • Ranting that American Jews aren’t loyal enough to Israel and telling them to “get their act together…before it is too late”
  • Hosting a White House Hanukkah party that featured an evangelical pastor who once said Jews are going to hell
  • Telling a room full of Jewish people that Jews are “brutal killers” and “not nice people at all”
  • Describing a majority-Black Baltimore district as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being” would “want to live”
  • Referring to COVID-19 as “kung flu
  • Saying undocumented immigrants “aren’t people, [they’re] animals
  • Reportedly telling his chief of staff “Hitler did a lot of good things,” and, after refusing to be disabused of the notion, needing to be told: “You cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t”
  • Refusing to condemn “white supremacist and militia groups” during one of the 2020 presidential debates
  • Threatening Black Lives Matter protesters with violence
The Dozens of Women Who’ve Accused Him of Sexual Misconduct

The long list includes writer E. Jean Carroll, whose accusation of rape Trump denied by claiming she wasn’t his “type.”

His Many Calls for Violence, Mostly Against People Who Disagree With Him

Even before January 6, Trump made his taste for brutality readily apparent, including when he referred to an ejected protester at a rally by saying, “I’d like to punch him in the face”; told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay. Just knock the hell—I promise you I will pay for the legal fees, I promise”; instructed police officers to not worry about knocking suspects’ heads against their squad cars; praised a congressman for assaulting a reporter; complained that “nobody wants to hurt each other anymore”; and openly fantasized about “Second Amendment people” preventing the appointment of liberal judges.

His Obsession With Using the Power of the Federal Government to Punish His Enemies

James Comey. Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama. Joe Biden. Trump wanted his Justice Department to prosecute or criminally investigate all of these people.

The Matter of His Setting the Wheels in Motion to Completely and Totally Destroy Reproductive Rights

Trump vowed to exclusively nominate conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. And he did! And they did!

His Horrific, Inhumane Family-Separation Policy

Between the summer of 2017 and and June 2018, Trump’s administration separated about 5,500 migrant children—some of whom were “barely more than infants”—from their parents. On June 26, 2018, a judge gave the government 30 days to reunite the families, yet emails would later reveal that the administration only had enough information to reconnect “about 60” parents with their kids. In November 2020, the parents of more than 600 children still had yet to be found. That same month it emerged that the year prior, the White House had blocked the Justice Department from making a deal to pay for mental health services for the people the Trump administration had irreparably harmed, including children who “thought their parents had deliberately abandoned them.” This was the work of actual monsters.

That Day He Tried to Get a Murderous Dictator to Help Him Take Down the President of the United States

Hey, remember when Trump asked Vladimir Putin—who was in the process of slaughtering countless Ukrainian citizens—to release dirt on Biden, claiming the Russian president would be happy to do so because he was “not exactly a fan of our country”? Honestly, you could be forgiven if you don’t, considering all the other fucked-up shit that’s happened since then. But he did that! Speaking of Putin, Trump unsurprisingly has no shortage of wildly glowing things to say about the guy, regardless of the war crimes.

His Call to Secretly Start a War Between China and Russia

Can anyone think of a reason why the U.S. probably shouldn’t put Chinese flags on its F-22 planes and “bomb the shit out of Russia”? And then say, “China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it”? And then “sit back and watch” as the two countries fight with each other? Trump can’t. (This would probably explain why he reportedly also thought the U.S. could “quietly” “shoot missiles into Mexico” and “no one would know it was us.”)

That Time He Tried to Extort a Foreign Country for His Own Political Gain

Did you know: The president of the United States actually isn’t supposed to do that.

That Time He Had Protesters Pepper Sprayed for a Photo Op

See above.

“Suckers” and “Losers”

You don’t have to be pro-war to think that it’s pretty fucked up for the commander in chief of the United States to call soldiers killed in war “suckers” and “losers,” as Trump reportedly did while on a 2018 trip to France, during which he also canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery because he didn’t want his hair to get messed up in the rain. The White House obviously denied the account at the time, but unfortunately it was more than a little believable, thanks to Trump’s history of smearing Gold Star families and his 2015 proclamation that Senator John McCain wasn’t really a war hero because he was captured and spent some five and half years in a North Vietnamese prison where he was routinely tortured. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said out loud, in public, as only a human parasite would. According to The Washington Post, he also once “told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got.”

COVID-19

He lied—and admitted he lied!—about how deadly the virus was. He let doctors and nurses fend for themselves. He encouraged people protesting sensible public health measures like social distancing and mask usage to “liberate” their states. He claimed COVID-19 “affects virtually nobody” just hours before the U.S. exceeded 200,000 deaths.

Trying to Kick Hundreds of Thousands of Americans Off of Food Stamps

In late 2019, Trump’s Agriculture Department announced a forthcoming new rule tightening the work requirements to be eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The change would have led to, by the government’s own estimation, nearly 700,000 people losing food stamps. The only reason it didn‘t happen? A federal judge struck down the move, calling it “arbitrary and capricious,” particularly given the fact that the administration wanted to go forward with it despite the pandemic—which had a huge impact on food insecurity.

His Moronic, Planet-Destroying Take on Climate Change

We’re just going to leave this here:

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His Habit of Lining His Pockets With Taxpayer Money

The government spent millions in taxpayer dollars at Trump’s for-profit properties, thanks to his insistence on visiting them hundreds of times over the course of his time in office. In addition to things like Mar-a-Lago hotel rooms for the Secret Service—which, contrary to Eric Trump‘s claims, were not provided gratis—the Trump Organization also billed taxpayers for glasses of water.

The Fact That He Lies About Everything All the Time

All politicians lie, but during Trump’s time in office, an entire cottage industry of fact-checking was created just to deal with the overwhelming volume of his lies. He lied about big things, small things, easily verifiable things, matters of public health, and everything in between. By The Washington Post’s estimate, he told more than 30,000 “false or misleading claims” over four years. If he were to get another four, the number would no doubt grow exponentially.

His Violent Outbursts

In addition to informing the January 6 committee that Trump allegedly lunged for the neck of a Secret Service agent, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in June that there were multiple instances in which he threw dishes against the wall because things hadn’t gone his way.

His Pardoning of War Criminals

Of the many pardons and commutations Trump issued while in office—a list that includes his son-in-law’s father and two health care executives who engaged in massive Medicare fraud—the most disturbing was arguably the one that wiped away the sentences of four Blackwater contractors convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

Pressuring the Justice Department to Investigate a Conspiracy Theory That Italian Satellites Had Switched Trump Votes to Biden Ones

This—the call for the investigation—actually happened.

The Meeting He Took Re: Imposing Martial Law to Redo the Election

Trump didn’t end up implementing disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s idea to use the military to “rerun” the 2020 election in swing states, but he was apparently more than happy to consider it. And you can probably bet an emboldened, second-term Trump wouldn’t hesitate to use the military for his own personal gain.

So there you have it: the 389,755 reasons why Trump should, at minimum, be banned from ever holding office again, if not barred from even entering the District of Columbia. If you’re wondering how we got to that number, the answer is that we decided that plotting to overturn a free and fair election and inciting a violent insurrection—in addition to all the other things that should prevent Trump from winning a second term—should get extra weight. The equation goes: (Plot to Steal a Second Term * Insurrection)3 + (Everything Else) = Fuck This Guy.

Of course, nothing here should be interpreted as suggesting that anyone but Trump would be fine, as there are a whole bunch of people out there with reported presidential ambitions who are equally as bad, if not worse, because they’ll more effectively get shitty things done. Take, for instance, the governor of Florida, whose former college teammate has described him thusly: “He has always loved embarrassing and humiliating people. I’m speaking for others—he was the biggest dick we knew.” That guy shouldn’t be president either, and if you need more reasons besides that love for embarrassing and humiliating people…we’ll have another handy guide out shortly.

This story was updated following Trump’s official announcement that he is running.