This post is a response to a question posed on Quora in its complete format: “Donald Trump desperately wants to be the best president. What would he have had to do differently in his two terms to be considered one of the best presidents the USA has ever had? Is it too late for him to change his ways and be the best president ever?”

That was never possible for him.
He would have had to have been a fundamentally different human being for that to be possible.

Donald J. Trump has always been a fundamentally broken human being who has left a wake of collateral damage in his journey through life.

The only way he could have achieved a status as a somewhat mediocre president, rather than a toxic stain on a nation built on freedom from tyrants, would have been by overcoming his horrifically destructive family legacy of corruption.

Donald J. Trump’s grandfather, a 16-year-old German barber named Friedrich Drumpf, boarded a ship with a one-way ticket to America to escape compulsory military service. He was among the wave of desirable German immigrants settling in America between 1880 and 1885. He began his new life as a barber, then became a restaurateur, saloonkeeper, hotelier, and gold-rush prospector, eventually becoming a New York real-estate investor.

Friedrich’s fortunes, however, came from his brothel operations.
“Friedrich Trump amassed a ‘substantial nest-egg’ from the Yukon hotel before heading to New York.”

How a Canadian adventure helped create the Donald Trump family story | CBC News

Friedrich became wealthy from the exploitation of women through sex for profit.

Friedrich had three children with his Bavarian wife, and their middle child, Fred, was Donald’s father. Fred became a successful businessman who amassed a fortune while many around him slumped into financial ruin.

Friedrich died on the morning of May 30 from pneumonia, and secondarily, nephritis during the period of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, just before his 50th birthday, while his son, Fred and his mother continued Friedrich’s real estate work.

Fred met two Scottish sisters at a party and eventually married the younger, Mary Ann MacLeod, who had lived in poverty her entire life as the daughter of a fisherman.

Fred died in a flu pandemic just before his 50th birthday, while Donald and his mother continued Fred’s real estate work.

(This summary was extracted from a somewhat sanitized article posted on History.com,

The Trump Family’s Immigrant Story | HISTORY )

The article fails to do more than hint at potentially embarrassing admissions of corrupt behaviour; however, Donald’s father, Fred, made several enemies among New York’s citizens, as Donald has. Woody Guthrie was considered a legendary folk singer who wrote several songs about Fred’s racist housing practices and his endorsements of segregation. Fred was clearly not a “nice man,” and it appears Donald inherited his racist hatreds from his father (just like all racist hatred has survived the generations).

Woody Guthrie, ‘Old Man Trump’ and a real estate empire’s racist foundations

Old Man Trump: Tom Morello gives new life to Woody Guthrie’s protest song

“In December 1950, Woody Guthrie moved to an apartment building in Brooklyn , Beach Haven Apartments. His landlord: Fred Trump, father of Donald Trump, gained millions in federal funds to construct postwar public housing, moving people of colour out of their neighbourhoods, and creating racial codes to keep decent housing out of the hands of persons of colour.”

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ….

Fred Trump’s racism was an obvious influence on Donald, which explains his actions when posting a full-page editorial in the New York Times endorsing the death penalty for five innocent black men who were eventually exonerated of the rape charges levelled against them.

Given what we know now of Donald Trump’s sexual predation history, this example of over-compensating behaviour makes even more sense today. Donald Trump has since still refused to apologize for this action. Donald Trump does not have a forgiving heart, nor is he capable of assuming ownership of his actions or demonstrating remorse for their consequences.

No one can expect to become an exceptional leader of anything if they cannot rise above the pettiness they have infamously wallowed in throughout their entire life.

For Donald to have achieved a character as a decent human being meant overcoming generational odds against him. To succeed at that would have required high intelligence and immense personal suffering and sacrifice.

Donald J. Trump was, at best, an unremarkable individual, and he allowed the toxicity of his lineage to define his character. Not only was Donald born into a fundamentally corrupt family, but he also leaned into the corruption. He embraced his lineage of hatred, which is the defining characteristic of the most corrupt among us: low intelligence and high cowardice, used to justify corrupt ethics.

Donald J. Trump has lived his entire life as a wailing child angry at a world that cheated him of greatness and has wasted every moment of his life getting revenge on the universe for not being handed the respect that “inferior in his mind” people like Obama seemed to have had given to them on a silver platter.

Trump could never achieve the kind of genuine respect that better people freely grant to public figures who deeply inspire us to become better people. He was never going to be anything better than mediocre. Instead, Trump chose the opposite, to become this century’s most destructive force for evil, we could have imagined being saddled with to teach us all some humility.

No matter how far we have gotten as a species, and no matter what it is that we have accomplished while rising above the primitive savagery we tell ourselves that we evolved past, Trump reminds us all that barbarism can easily become our future if we don’t stand against it.

Trump will die as a stain on a nation once considered great and as a cautionary tale for a future that is rapidly transforming into a world that will become either a nightmare for whomever from the billions among us who will survive an impending catastrophe, or will successfully catalyze such a resistance that our progeny can lack back on and feel proud that we, as a people, rose to the occassion and gave our all to fix what is broken and make this a better world for our future as a species on this planet.

Since this piece is being published on the last day of an incredibly dysphoric 2025, I want to wish you a festive New Year’s celebration filled with hope for a far better 2026 than many have had to endure.

Thank you for reading this post, and a special thank you to my Quora readers who quickly blew up a shorter version filled with errors to support my efforts with their acknowledgments (and corrections).