When Donald Trump kicked off his presidential bid in 2015, he rode down a golden escalator in Trump Tower, using the media attention to promote his own brand and property. He lied. He made racist comments. And he exaggerated the crowd size.
Trump has been exactly the man he presented himself to be during the campaign, if not worse. He largely abandoned his populist promises to pursue the same trickle-down economic policies that are standard GOP fare. He has continued to make racist and sexist remarks ― and pursue those sorts of policies ― and has used the presidency to enrich himself and his family, writes Amanda Terkel, HuffPost's Washington bureau chief, for an article on how Trump has been worse than anyone expected.
Here is Terkel on how the article came to be.
This is one of those stories that sums up exactly what everyone has been thinking lately. But what was the seed for you?
We've obviously been doing a lot of planning for election night and beyond, figuring out what pieces we want to get ready and brainstorming possible scenarios to write about. But that also led us to start looking back over the past four years and everything that happened. And this piece was the glum conclusion of that process.
There are so many ways Trump has been so much worse than anyone could imagine. How did you figure out how to narrow it down so that readers could take it all in?
This piece is fairly long, but there's so much more we didn't put in! We focused on a few areas where Trump has really stepped over the line in what people expected he would do. But obviously, there are so many other topics that we could have included -- the environment, relations with other countries, decimating the civil service and government morale, packing the courts with unqualified extremists and so forth.
Over the course of the reporting, looking back over the past four years, did any particular action of the Trump administration surprise you? Something, perhaps, you forgot he did early on?
What struck me was how little impeachment is mentioned these days! It was a historic moment, and it's not even a blip during the campaign.
Anything else you would like to add?
Trump has so radically changed the boundaries of what it is acceptable for a president to do that I'm curious to see whether, going forward, other presidents use him as a precedent to also do what they want. | 