Oddly enough, I came across the below just this morning:
Nixon in a New York minute. Not even close. And I despised Nixon.
You only have to look back in shame if you participated in MAGA crimes.
As for embarrassment, it would be nice to be able to say to the grandkids, if asked, that you did something beyond posting on the internet. Maybe you participated in non-violent protests, maybe you gave money, maybe you volunteered to help victims of Trumpism. Just something. I suspect that most here have.
Aside from Watergate, Nixon was actually a pretty good president. SALT treaty, created the EPA, ended the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, desegregated Southern schools, created OSHA, expanded Social Security, won a 49-state landslide, etc.
A light-year better than Trump.
Pity Nixon didn’t live to hear people say that.
Oh, there can be a worse president than Trump. How about a Christian religious fundamentalist determined to drag America back kicking and screaming to a vengeful god? Including death by stoning on mandatory pay per view?
Oh, separation of church and state? After Trump and his Nazis got through tearing up and shitting all over the Constitution, no one will care or lift a finger to bring it back.
But nostalgia for Trump? No. Never.
Indeed. Trump at least knows almost nothing of Christianity and even Vance isn’t a true diehard theocrat.
The greatest danger we’re facing is the mistaken belief that Trump and his maga followers are doing all of this. They’re not. Trump is an idiot and his followers are even dumber.
What we’re experiencing is a planned program being carried out by the Republican party to undermine democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law. Trump is just their figurehead.
The problem is a lot bigger than Donald Trump. Fixing the problem and getting us back to normal will involve a lot more than just getting rid of Trump.
GOOD GOD NO! Hopefully there will still be a USA. The only thing he is good at is destruction.
Nostalgia, longing? It will be contempt because we are going to spend years if not decades trying to put the country back together. His supporters will need to find new rocks to crawl under.
Supposedly (I admit I have no immediate cites) there are people who lived in the former USSR who pine for the predictability of the ‘good old days’? Anyone have any more first-hand reports about this?
Sort of sorry I used W. as my example, since we seem to have gotten off on a referendum about the dum-dum.My larger point is that Eisenhower was a sort of dumbish protector of the status quo, but when Nixon came along, we said “Oh, God, I thought Ike was bad but this?” and when Reagan came along we said the same about Nixon, (“at least the guy had a functioning brain!” and when W. came along we said “Man! I thought Reagan was a brainless ninny.. This guy can’t even wrestle an English sentence to a draw.”
No one hated Bush more than I did, but at least he wasn’t explicitly enriching himself and ordering his administration to violate the Constitution openly.
But It’s possible for the next one to make Trump seem benign because at least Trump has the “virtue” of being dumber than a rock and blatantly giving off an arrogant vibe because he thinks it’s cool. The next one could adopt the same exact policies, but do it smoothly, commit his crimes more secretly, speak in complete sentences that appear (to someone not listening closely) to make sense and actually court popular support more effectively. That’s my point. It’s hard to imagine, actually, someone LESS skillful than Trump at appealing to a certain slice of the electorate. That’s a scary thought..
Vance just doesn’t have the crappy carnival barker charisma and long presence in the public mind that Trump possesses.
And no one can justify their support of Vance by saying ‘it’s not the racism and fascism I support, it’s that he’s a Great Businessman.’
Not that Donald ever was, either—but he had Mark Burnett spending years convincing people that he was. Thus was born Plausible Deniability.
With Vance, people have to outright admit that they’re voting for a guy who states he’s making up stories about immigrants eating dogs and cats (in order to get rid of those immigrants). There’s nothing to hide behind. If you support Vance, you’re admitting you’re a bigot.
And a lot of people don’t like doing that. (If they did, George Wallace would have been elected decades ago.)
It’s true that some other vicious fascist who happens to offer Plausible Deniability could get elected. And be smarter and more efficient in establishing that fascism than Donald has proven to be. But if that were to happen, most of us wouldn’t be around to bemoan the Good Old Trump Days. Or have the time to do so, in the work camps. (There’s not a lot of time for reflection in those situations).
I’m going to go against the grain here by stating that I think GWB was a worse President than DJT. That’s emphatically not an endorsement of Trump. It’s just that nothing Trump has done - not the mass deportations, not the failed attempt to steal the 2020 election, not the meme coin bullshit, none of it - compares to lying the USA into an immoral, needless war. He might do worse in his three remaining years, but I can only go by what he’s actually done, and on that basis, if you told me the 2028 election was going to be between GWB and Trump, and you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one or the other, I’d pick Trump, no question.
All of which is to say, I will never be nostalgic for GWB and it’s astonishing how successfully he’s managed to launder his reputation. He should’ve been tried and convicted at The Hague.
I don’t see how anyone will ever look back at him with “longing”. I do worry about whether we’re going to forgive all his toadies and apologists (KKKaroline Leavitt, Bondi, Stephen Miller, Noem, Kash, Hegseth, RFK Jr, etc) once he’s dead and gone.
I’ll admit that when I heard that Marjorie Taylor Green had cut bait on MAGA, for just a nanosecond I allowed myself a moment of “ok, maybe she’s not so despicable after all” until I snapped back to reality.
I’d imagine at some point in the future, we’re going to see those people I listed being called to testify in hearings or trials of some varying degree. If by chance tRump is already six feet under by then, and they start in with tearful pleas of “I was just following orders, I always hated him as much as everyone else did”, I hope we don’t let them off the hook.
You left out “obstinate mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to downplay its seriousness, vocally supporting quack treatments (ivermectin, chloroquine, etc.), and sowing doubt among Americans about the CDC and our public health system.”
I have no doubt that a fair number of the Americans who died due to COVID would not have died if an actual functioning human being had been President in 2020.
Umm… We are getting close though.
It’s an interesting question – I would have guessed that Trump led to more American deaths, with his hedging on the COVID stuff and hiring RFK Jr, but fewer overseas deaths than W. However, the drastic and immediate cuts to USAID have apparently led to hundreds of thousands of deaths overseas. I imagine if we slowly pulled funding, allowing other countries to pick up the slack, rather than just slashing USAID, it would have been better.
The premise of this thread is flawed. I certainly do not regard W with nostalgia and longing. He was a terrible, terrible president who mishandled intelligence and lied us into an unnecessary war. He was far less corrupt than Trump, I guess, but certainly put us further along the road to authoritarianism with his “with us or with the terrorists” bullshit.
Try anger and disgust.
No. Trump is a worse president than Dubya. Presidents have gotten us into immoral, needless wars before, i.e. the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, Vietnam. But NO American president has attempted to foment an insurrection against the United States to stay in power. THAT is why Trump is worse than Dubya and he is unfit to be president. Period.
I wouldn’t say “nostalgic,” but Trump’s 1st term was a whole lot better than his 2nd, except for Covid in the last year.
The years of 2017-2019 were not that bad. 2025-onwards is a shitshow.