opinion | What Tucker Carlson really thinks

Its corruption, its zeal to bet Millions of dollars in tax dollars into its resorts and properties and its willingness to rent accepted by his family huge sums of money from foreign entities is deeply worrying. We will likely discover more examples of its outright transplantation for years, if not decades to come. There are considerable evidence this suggests that he committed crimes in office.

And yet this is still a somewhat superficial diagnosis. If you dig deeper, you will see that for all the shortcomings just listed, the Trump years were extremely disastrous for the social and civic health of the United States. The increase in suffering and despair was profound. Donald Trump’s presidency has struck the American spirit.

Tucker Carlson knows this. He spends much of the airtime focusing on the plight of the American working class. He talks a lot about crime and desperate deaths. He knows all about Trump’s mistakes — mistakes we can now fully document across virtually every major measure of American well-being.

When Trump was sworn in, he promised to undo “this American carnage,” the “crime and the gangs and the drugs” that claimed so many American lives. But the “carnage” only increased. The homicide rate was significantly higher when he left office. There were tens of thousands more drug overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2016. And for all the talk about Trump’s anti-abortion policies for the first time in 30 years the number of abortions elevated under an American president. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “8 percent more abortions were performed in 2020 than in 2017.” This means that there were around 70,000 more abortions in 2020 than when Trump took office.

The above statistics relate to matters of life and death, but they are likely indicative of still other, deeper measures of personal pain and suffering that were also increasing beyond reasonable expectation. Trump divided America. partisan polarization reached its modern peak under Trump and sheer party hostility also increased. American mental health deteriorated. The rate of depression was already increasing before Covid – it increased from 2015 to 2019 – and the pandemic made the trend worse.

This increase in negative statistics has been accompanied by a decrease in positive statistics. For example, the marriage rate, which had stabilized during the Obama years, crashed during the Trump years. The American Birth Rate continued its long decline.

American presidents are not powerful enough to control all of these social factors. Many of the negative trends (drug overdose deaths are among the most notable) existed well before Trump, but they continued under Trump. Presidents can’t control cultures, but they can help heal or they can do further damage, and Trump has caused serious damage.