Trump makes W look better by comparison, but I honestly don’t think you could get a human being that is so much dumber, so much more hateful, so much more of a liar, so much more narcissistic, that he would be significantly worse than Trump in all those categories. I guess if we got a leader that killed 40%+ of our population he’d make Trump seem better in comparison, but you’d have to get into Stalin/Hitler/Mao territory to even have a chance of making people think Trump was harmless. Trump is one of the most vile human beings ever to live.He exhibits the top of the range of so many bad human traits. In comparison, W was just pretty shitty.
Yeah this is a better comparison than to GW. We could get someone that is a Hitler to Trump’s Mussolini, and makes us miss Trump. But, even compared to Hitler, Mussolini was not a harmless cuddly bunny
I didn’t interpret that as PhillyGuy denying that he is a mass murderer. Just said that the truth of the central claim of the sentence is true regardless of whether or not he is one.
I personally don’t know what a mass murderer sounds like. I’ve heard clips of some very soft-spoken brutal dictators.
When Bush left office we were facing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And he initiated a war on a tactic, terrorism, just to feed war profiteers. While I think that Trump is on his way to a worse record, I in no way feel nostalgic for George W Bush or his administration.
Nope, I won’t look back with nostalgia for Trump. There could certainly be worse … leaders, rulers, dictators, presidents … but if there are, Trump will always be the guy who opened the door for them. Openly corrupt, openly against fair elections, openly scoffing at facts, science, honest history, the rule of law.
You say that like these things have held him back from being popular. His support base doesn’t care that he can’t speak coherently. They don’t care that he was found civilly liable of sexual assault. They don’t care that he’s on tape saying, “grab them by the pussy”.
Other than that, yeah, I’d have laughed right alongside you if 10 years ago someone told me I’d be looking back at the Dubya administration as not being the worst Republican administration in my lifetime.
Yes, things could get much much worse in the US.
Trump thankfully mostly just talks. He passes bad bills that empower the rich and harm everyone else, but Republicans have been doing that for a century.
The real risk is if we get economic collapse and meaningful advances in authoritarianism. Right now luckily, the advances in authoritarianism are mostly just for show.
When human and political rights get rolled back to the 19th century, then we will look back at today and reminisce how it wasn’t that bad yet.
Yeah, it’s not nostalgia that many on the left feel so much as a mix of bemusement and horror that the Republicans were able to sink so much lower.
Still, my wife and I visited the 9/11 Museum at Ground Zero not that long ago, and they had a screen showing clips of GWB’s address from the Oval Office after the attacks. I turned to my wife afterwards and said, “To think there would come a come day when we would be pining for the eloquence and statesmanship of George W. Bush.”
It really kind of blows my mind now to think that a man who said “Islam is peace” after 9/11, pushed for sensible immigration of reform that included a path to citizenship for the undocumented, and offered billions to fight AIDS in Africa was once the Republican standard-bearer.