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Jimmy Carter gets the break he deserves: Trump is now the poster child for weak Presidents [1]

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Date: 2025-04-09

"Jimmy Carter" was shorthand for ineffective Presidents. Trump himself promoted the meme by saying Biden was “worse than Jimmy Carter by a long shot.” Now Trump has been hoist by his own petard. And is rightly now the poster child for weak Presidents.

First some housekeeping. The dismissive characterization of Carter is unfair. With time, it is dissipating. According to 26 polls of historians , Carter ranks 26th out of the 45 officeholders. For a post-presidential career, he is arguably #1. As a human being, there were few, if any, finer.

By contrast, in the five polls of scholars since his first term, they rank Trump anywhere from 41st to dead last. It is hard to imagine him doing anything in his second term that will improve his grade. After his first go around, Trump proved to be a whiny bitch with no redeeming qualities. And as a man, he is a mentally defective sadist; a demented, sociopathic liar; and as thick as a brick.

Even more than that, this week (and it's only Wednesday), he has proved he is a weak man. A bully to the powerless but jelly-spined when the waters get choppy. Despite his administration boasting he would stay the course on his trade policy, he folded.

Last week, his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick (a new contender for DC's dumbest), said that Trump would not back off his tariffs . That did not age well. Aside: Lutnick also demanded that Americans just "let Trump run the global economy… he's been talking about it for 35 years." Howard is smoking something powerful — as he seems to have forgotten that in those 35 years, Trump went bankrupt six times.

It's not just Lutnick; sycophancy runs deep in Trumpland. On Tuesday, his personal 'Baghdad Bob,' the vacuous Karoline Leavitt, gave her boss the Goebbels treatment by saying :

"President Trump has a spine of steel and he will not break. America will not break under his leadership."

On Tuesday night, the man himself told the congressional MAGAs at the NRCC dinner that:

"And I think we're helped a lot by the tariff situation that's going on, which is a good situation, not a bad. It's great. It's gonna legendary! You watch! Legendary in a positive way, I have to say. It's going to be legendary!"

Really? By Wednesday afternoon, the "legendary in a positive way" tariffs had disappeared like a fart in a hurricane. Trump even confirmed that his caving on tariffs was not part of a master plan but was due to fear when he said after the news of his reversal broke:

”Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid."

I think we all know who was getting “a little bit afraid.”

Many have speculated that the tariff debacle (technically on hold for 90 days, but let's see what happens) was a pump-and-dump scheme in reverse. The thinking goes that those-in-the-know sold stocks before the 'Liberation Day' declaration tanked the stock markets. Then bought after the markets suffered double-digit percentage declines to get in on the rebound after Trump announced a three-month temporary stay of execution of the American economy.

Maybe. But the man knows the vox populi will slam him as a spineless ignoramus. And his self-image is more important to him than money. Besides, when has Trump ever done anything for someone else? If there is a there, there, let the investigative journalists dig it out.

It isn't just his reversal that paints Trump as a weak and ineffective man. He is also a capricious and hormonal boss. Strong leaders keep their teams onside. Trump's gang (the one that can't shoot straight) were all over the map.

They toed the party line that the tariff madness was not a negotiation tactic. Then Trump claimed it was. And that (according to his Karoline) the leaders of 70 countries — desperate to take crumbs from America's trade table rather than suffer inglorious defeat at the hands of an economic maestro at the peak of his incredible mental powers — were kissing his ass.

Anyone who thought they were watching North Korean political propaganda translated into English should be forgiven. The sycophancy was the most cloying event in US history since Boston's Great Molasses Flood in 1919 .

Scott Bessent, Trump's Treasury Secretary, wasted no time spinning Trump's retreat as a victory. The man must have a high tolerance for scorn as he offered this howler to the media :

"It took great courage for him to stay the course until this moment. This was his strategy all along."

Really Scottie? That isn't what the author of this calamitous yo-yoing is saying. Asked why he cut and ran, Trump baffled everyone by telling the truth. He said the real reason for the volte-face was:

"The bond market right now is beautiful. But I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy."

I'll say they were. Let's remember that last night was the aforementioned National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Dinner. It is not hard to imagine the tone of the event. Trump planned to steady the ship. But he ran into an irresistible force — a group of political incumbents fighting like cornered animals to keep their snouts in the public trough.

Their panicked alarm must have given them the spine to stand up to their godhead's aggressive stupidity. I imagine the bully Trump took some unexpected incoming from people so desperate to improve their reelectiblity that they quit their reflexive knob-polishing to actually take a stand for something — even if it was only their own political futures.

Trump's capitulation on tariffs is hardly surprising. He's had plenty of practice with the penalties on Canada and Mexico. His on-again, off-again whipsaw approach to tariffs on America's neighbors and erstwhile friends left everyone staggering on shifting sands.

Now, Trump has backed himself into a corner. Should he decide to reimplement his tariffs, everyone knows they only need to wait until he changes his mind again. Meanwhile, the damage is done. The rest of the world will work hard to 'Trump-proof' their trade arrangements. And it will be a long time before anyone trusts America again.

That's what happens when you have a weak and ineffectual President floundering in his craven ignorance. Ronald Reagan is the man who started the rot in the GOP with his unAmerican "you can't trust government" nonsense. But at least he stuck to his anti-Soviet rhetoric (when he wasn't selling weapons to Iran). That's about the best you can expect from a Republican. Mind you, it's all been downhill from there. What an arc. Ron to W. to Don — dumb, dumber, and dumbest.

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