I think there is a race to the bottom. What Bush did, at that time, was push past the law/morals to the bottom. Once that’s done, it rarely rises back up again. Obama didn’t/couldn’t stop a lot of what Bush was doing that everyone hated. Now, it doesn’t seem as bad in comparison.
Trump is much worse. We have a new much worse bottom, and the 2nd term worse than the 1st.
But yes, we will still look back fondly. Because the reality is there is no bottom and things can get so much worse. You can keep going, little by little, down forever. I suppose the end of humanity would be the bottom, but that’s incredibly far down.
The time I almost died in the hospital from a bleeding brain does not make me look fondly at the time I had my fingers slammed in a car door and waited 20 minutes for someone to come by and open the door.
Some people disliked W at the time, but acknowledged his later humanitarian and charity work, apparently sincere religiosity, and that his legacy included some brighter spots.
Some admire Trump now and will continue to do so. Trump has less time available to develop future humanitarian and charity efforts and sincere religiosity. His current efforts in these areas have possibly not been optimal.
Not that we will, but he might look back at Trump with nostalgia.
Suppose one makes a very rough analogy between the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and Trump blowing up NATO.
And suppose Trump doesn’t start any substantial wars.
The next Democratic president? Very rough analogy to Boris Yeltsin.
And the following GOP president – close analogy to Putin.
Then the American Putin, who sees the collapse of NATO as the greatest tragedy of their life, does to Canada what the real Putin is doing to Ukraine.
There are a lot of ifs here. But if Trump turn out to be, by American presidential standards, on the less warlike side, and the next U.S. president tries to conquer countries Trump tuned his back on, yea, Trump will seem to have been a better sort of Republican.
