Donald Trump's ascendancy to the presidency was predicated on one thing: the idea that a black man was not capable of running the country. It doesn't matter that Barack Obama was light-years ahead of Trump in his ability to elucidate what our country really stands for; or that Obama followed Constitutional principles in his approach to running the country; or that Obama's personal life and  presidential administration were free from any sort of real scandal. (In spite of a hundred attempts to find one.) No, what mattered was that, for an embarrassingly large number of Americans, Obama's blackness disqualified him as a worthy representative of the American people.
   This idea was pounced upon by the Republican party and employed as a dog-whistle wedge issue without actually playing the race card. That they did this cannot be denied, from the 'one-term-presidency', to their persistent unwillingness to work with him on any legislation at all. Their non-stop denunciation of his motives, his birthplace, his religion, his wife's attempts to deliver better food to schoolchildren, etc., etc., etc. The main point in all of it was that Barack Obama was not a worthy individual. It went without saying that he just happened to be a black man. In complete opposition to reality, his presidency was painted as the end of America's greatness.
   So now we have Donald Trump and we can see what an unworthy representative of the American people really looks like. With absolutely zero accomplishments outside of the acquisition of power, the Trump administration is an embarrassment for the whole world to judge. Oh yeah, Trump has stayed busy, issuing executive orders that undo whatever ones Obama had enacted, and appointing young judges to lifetime positions to ensure that the agenda of the wealthy elite is ensconced in the courts for the next forty or fifty years.
   As for undoing some of the foreign policy moves that Obama had made during his two terms in office, we have the Paris Accords on climate change and the Trans Pacific Partnership as two glaring examples of how Trump has undermined American interests abroad. The TPP was designed mostly by the American financial sector to weaken China's grip on trade dominance in the Pacific region. Well, Obama was for it, so the Republicans have to be against it. Now Trump is doing everything in his power to piss off China in the other aspects of national trade issues. He does it all with the finesse of a ham-fisted butcher, his trademark approach to everything. His denial of human induced global warming and subsequent withdrawal from the Paris accords is simply stupid and will set American interests back by twenty years in terms of developing green energy sources. His woeful approach to undermining the Departments of State and Energy is truly frightening and dangerous. I won't even talk about Russia, NATO, Central America, Mexico, and Canada.
   Now we have Trump's lack of statesmanship to provide insight into our most pressing domestic issues-the economy, race and violence. For starters, he is trying to take credit for Obama's success in pulling the economy out of dire straits and establishing an upward trend in employment. Then we have Charlottesville and a vainglorious Commander-In-Chief who cannot bring himself to denounce hate groups without two days of coaching. Why? Because those groups were a significant part of his electoral base. It was racism that got him elected and he knows it. The Republicans know it, too, but they are so enamored with power that they can't bring themselves to denounce his behavior for fear of an electoral backlash.
   Donald Trump didn't recognize integrity when it took him by the hand and walked him through the White House, trying to ensure a peaceful transition of power. The Republican refusal to recognize Obama's integrity, coupled with the abandonment of their duty to America's interests while he was president, managed to mislead the American public into giving them absolute political power and they can't do anything worthwhile with it because they managed to destroy America's trust in democracy along the way.
   Republican lust for power has given us the worst possible president available. Their abandonment of integrity has made our country much worse off than it should be, after we had eight years of true integrity, intelligence and fair-mindedness in the executive office. Too many people are learning the hard way that the color of a man's skin means so much less than the quality of his character.