Goodbye, and good riddance

 Understand this: I'm not a petty person, nor am I particularly vindictive. It takes a lot to earn my hatred, and even more to earn my contempt.

Ultimately, Donald J. Trump got both.

When I say "hatred" or "contempt" I mean exactly that; there are any number of people I've met in my personal life who've earned one or the other due to their behavior towards me or friends and loved ones of mine, and most of them will only be able to get off of my shitlist for the things they've done by fixing the damage they've caused.

Politicians, at least in the United States, are different - they can always be voted out of office if you're in the right jurisdiction, and if you're not they can always be made targets of the derision they deserve in other, perfectly legal ways. It's a normal thing in a democracy to dislike people holding public office that you didn't vote for or ones that ended up a disappointment that you did, and there's no reason to feel guilt at that fact unless that dislike is based on irrational, ridiculous reasons.

The reasons that I hate Trump are hardly irrational or ridiculous. If anything, they're anything but that (see this link in RationalWiki that details a good number of them), and the idea that only one human being sitting in the White House for four years could do so much damage to the country he falsely claims to love so much is horrifying.

Unfortunately, that damage is real. And extensive.

I could go on and on about how his administration's feeble, incompetent actions during the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in a death total of over 400,000 (nearly twice the second worst national total, Brazil's), or the fact that his cult-like standing among his followers led a number of them to join with white supremacists and other armed wackjobs in attacking the assembled Senate and House of Representatives on January 6th in order to violently overturn the counting of electoral college votes. Those are only two of the most recent things he's managed to do to us in four years, and if I listed all the others it'd take hours to read in summary form and days to finish if I went into full detail. So I'll have to be brief and say that he was nothing but trouble since his inauguration and the closest thing to a walking plague in expensive shoes at his worst.

And in roughly an hour, he'll finally, mercifully, be out of office.

As expected, his farewell speech was full of the usual triumphalist, egotistic garbage and was singularly lacking in self-awareness or even a connection to outward reality, and I'll only listen to it if I have to remind myself of why I despise him.

Joe Biden may be able to undo a good deal of the damage Trump caused to the Federal government's ability to function, but it's questionable if he can undo the damage to our already fractious political culture. That latter issue may take years - if not decades - to address, and we can't keep going this way as a nation and survive. And in a way, this may be one of the greatest crimes Trump has committed. National politics in the United States since the 1980s have been increasingly zero-sum and unpleasant, and Trump and his enablers have succeeded in making it exceedingly ugly and even barbaric at times. Just one look at what happened on January 6th will convince you of that fact.

After all that, the nicest thing I can say about Trump being gone is this: "goodbye, and good riddance". He came close to ruining us. Here's hoping he never finds a way to finish what he started.