Say it ain’t so, Joe!

That was the plea attributed to a youthful fan of baseball star Joe Jackson regarding his involvement in the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Certainly, we are enduring the worst presidency in our 250 year history. And I believe this deplorable situation was greatly aided, if not abetted, by the previous occupant.

One of the best moments of my life was when I removed the “NMP” (Not My President) oval from the rear bumper of my car. It was January 20, 2020, and it had been on there most of Trump’s first term. I joyously thought we were rid of him for good. Remember those halcyon days when we suddenly ceased hearing or reading the name “Trump” or seeing his face within 10 seconds of opening any publication or viewing any electronic media. It was a euphoria compounded by its contrast with the dread we’d so recently witnessed on Jan 6. 

Of course, there was still a lot of the social and economic detritus of the pandemic to be dealt with, but it was so nice to put the presidency and the whole Washington thing on the back burner, to look out the window and take in the real world. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long.

Uncle Joe wasted no time in stepping in it with the sudden, disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The optics of those frantically-desperate Afghanis clinging to sides of that taxiing Air Force transport were depressingly reminiscent of the shameful departure of that last Huey from the roof of our Saigon embassy in 1975–except it was in full 1040p. That was followed by the images of the thousands upon thousands of would-be immigrants wading across the Rio Grande, or sneaking through holes in fences along our southern border. These immigrants had already passed their literacy test because they’d read about Biden’s wholesale suspension of the existing Trump border policies and taken that as an open invitation to come.

Then there was the non-stop, four-year-long “persecution” of Donald Trump. Sure, he is guilty as hell of all of which he was accused, and now much more. But it was Congress’s job to impeach him, and when Mitch McConnell, the second most evil person in US political history, saw that that didn’t happen, we should have simply cast Donald Trump into oblivion. Instead, he was allowed, even encouraged, to leverage all that attention to keep his name constantly before the public. In one thing Trump is right: When it comes to him, there is no such thing as negative publicity–just free advertising.

But perhaps most contributory to our current predicament was Joe’s obvious mental and physical decline. He let his ego get in the way of his reality and precipitated all that chaos with just two months to go before the election. That whole mess could have been avoided if he’d stuck to his implied campaign promise of being only a one-term, transition president. Who knows who might have emerged as a candidate if spring primaries had taken place, or what the November outcome might have been. But Joe pretty much guaranteed the future, and that’s unforgivable.

Sorry, Joe. I know you’ve had a tough personal life. God knows you told us about it often enough. But that doesn’t warrant getting a get-out-of-jail-free card for my conviction that the current Trump regime is in large measure a creature of your making. I won’t bother asking you if “It ain’t so,” because I’m sure it is.

©2026, David B Bucher