Woozle/2021/11/08

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This is a comment crossposted from Nextdoor.

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It's difficult to be quantitative when assessing the performance of a political figure.

Although I do think such metrics are possible -- e.g. a Congressbeast's record in supporting/opposing unarguably good or bad legislation -- as far as I know there is no source where this data is accumulated quantitatively. That is a growing need, in this increasingly online/digital era.

It gets even more complicated when talking about a political office such as the Presidency, where actions are much more qualitative.

That said -- in a case like #45, there are some outstanding metrics one could look at, such as the number of falsehoods told while in office, the number of (at least apparently) illegal acts committed.

I can imagine forgiving some of the "softer" areas of his awfulness (e.g. equivocating between N*zis and their victims; painting South Americans as criminals and rapists; speaking unapologetically about committing sexual assault; being an absolutely terrible businessman who squandered his inherited fortune while cheating honest contractors out of payment for their work;...) if he had at least had reasonable policies and had used his manifest charisma to lead rather than mislead.

Sadly, he did not.

His policies were wildly inconsistent and usually seriously bad for the country -- and he clearly had no interest in leading nor any care for the citizenry under his care, except to the extent that they served as funding-troughs or as cheerleaders to feed his deep narcissism.

Perhaps the applicable metric here should be "number of ways in which the norms of the office were violated in obviously detrimental ways". I'm pretty sure his numbers in that area would be the greatest ever.