Didn't Think This Through: Difference between revisions

* Many of [[Donald Trump]]'s detractors have stated that simply thinking a few minutes before hitting the "Send" button on Twitter might have solved a lot of his problems.

** The most notable example was the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol January 6, 2021 Capitol Building riot], which he at least partially encouraged. Breaking and entering the seat of the United States government (something that did not happen even during the [[American Civil War]]) and assaulting police is ''not'' the right way to convince everyone that the opposing candidate "stole" the election. The blatant act of terrorism caused Trump to lose much of his already waning support, and also caused the press to refer to him with words like "fascist", "traitor", and "Nazi", which they had, up to then, tried hard to avoid doing. Whatever the case, it was obvious to everyone [[Captain Obvious| it did not improve his political career or reputation]], likely ruining it and that of many others.

** The storm of pardons he issued in his final weeks in office. Accepting a pardon by American law is an admission of guilt by the pardoned party, but worse, doing so removes the recipient's protection against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment (because they can't be prosecuted they can't incriminate themselves); consequently they can be compelled to testify -- in this case, against Trump. It took several weeks for this to occur to anyone in Trump's White House (at which point it was too late); Federal investigators, of course, were aware of this and are more than happy to trade the convictions of a few underlings for testimony against Trump himself.

** His border wall - likely the keystone of his original campaign - was an ill-conceived and unrealistic goal right from the start, for many reasons: