I think Trump is the worst president in living memory. Change my mind.
Up until recently, the one saving grace for president Trump was that he did not cause the deaths of thousands of Americans (lets assume that cutting taxes and social programs is not the same thing as causing deaths). The 4500 unnecessary deaths of Americans caused by President Bush’s invasion of Iraq have now been surpassed by the coronavirus death toll of 5102.
It’s not like there wasn’t a playbook, we wrote one for a broad range of scenarios when the ebola virus looked like it might spread. But disbanded the white house task force and ignored the playbook apparently because the cost, both economic (which looks like chickenfeed by the standards of the $2 TRILLION stimulus) and political (if this electorate has any brains at all, they will hold this party accountable for as long as anyone alive today can grieve for anyone that dies of this damn thing). Or maybe it was something else but I can’t think of a better reason than these two.
It’s not like there weren’t real world contemporaneous examples of how other countries contained the threat and how they screwed it up. We decided to follow the screw-ups. All in an apparent attempt to keep the stock market afloat a few more days.
Many of these 5102 deaths were not necessary. And now we are being told that 100,000 deaths is a good job? A GOOD FUCKING JOB because it could have been millions if they did nothing at all? Korea has 162 deaths and it looks like it will only inch up from there. They’re a smaller country but not THAT much fucking smaller!
Trump closed off China in January and bought us a month of extra preparation time during which he played politics and whistled past the graveyard. It’s like he’s pointing to a first down he made in the first drive of the game and claiming a win despite killing everyone in the stadium twice.
He also doomed our economy to a horrible recession that may end up killing more people than the virus. Every country hit with this virus is going to have a recession but not as bad as ours or Italy’s.
So I think Trump is now a worse president than George W Bush. Change my mind.
Or just convince me that he did a good job in his response to the coronavirus.
To me George W. Bush is still the worst he got us into a senseless war that didn’t just kill American troops but a huge number of Iraqi civilians both directly and indirectly. Trump may not be a great president but I don’t think he has done as much damage as Bush at this present moment anyway and there are many other evils that happened under Bush as well, things like the patriot act and clamping down on civil liberties. Bush also majorly fucked up the economy it just didn’t really come to a head until right when he left office.
From wiki:
“460,000 deaths in Iraq as direct or indirect result of the war including more than 60% of deaths directly attributable to violence. 110,600 violent deaths. 183,535 – 206,107 civilian deaths from violence. 109,032 deaths including 66,081 civilian deaths.”
I have to agree Trump is worse than Bush, but give bush credit where credit is due. He had the most evil Vice President/Puppet Master in Dick Cheney. Also Cheney is responsible for getting into the war in Iraq, not Bush. Bush is pathetic for letting Cheney manipulate so much. Trump is fucking awful all on his own.
W./Dick caused the senseless deaths of at least 100,000 Iraqis over the course of the occupation, and created ISIL by their actions, so, I think I still count them as worse overall. Individual-ONE is basically doing what W./Dick would have gotten around to eventually had they been able to, so on a real, practical level, he is not measurably worse.
I saw a clip the other day of George W. Bush and his truck on Jay Leno’s Garage. Not once in my life did I ever think I would feel anything good towards George W. Bush, but Jesus, I saw him talking for a few seconds and I was like, GOD I WOULD RATHER HAVE THIS DUDE AS PRESIDENT RIGHT NOW. That’s saying something, because I’m 33 and so Bush was in charge during my teenage years up through adulthood, and he was the first president I voted against (2004) and I always thought he was a joke every time I saw him on TV.
But for fuck’s sake, he wasn’t this hateful, hurtful, malignant, relentlessly odious presence that Trump is.
When the crash happened in 2008, Bush had the good sense to get out of the way and let the people who knew what they were doing at it. Trump would have been out there telling everyone that the market would recover any day now while the financial system froze up.
Not using his authority to get ventilators made and shipped to points of need without having the governors (and FEMA) bidding against each other is criminal.
Around 800,000 people died in Iraq because of Bush. Trump still has a way to go. Besides, it’s not just about the body count. The people who died in Iraq were victims of Bush’s deliberate and persistent lies. The people dying of COVID-19 today are victims of Trump’s incompetence, laziness, and general dumbshittery. Morally, there’s a clear difference.
It’s not reasonable to use raw body counts as the sole criterion. Lincoln’s Civil War cost 750,000 lives; the JFK-LBJ-RMN war in Southeast Asia cost far more Asian lives than even that.
Nor is raw economic damage a proper criterion: the intelligent and well-intentioned Herbert Hoover’s deflationary policies deepened the Depression significantly.
Instead we must assess malice, greed and blatant incompetence; this will be hard to do objectively. Johnson made a big mistake in Vietnam, but he wasn’t an evil or stupid man. Cheney OTOH deserves a special place in Hell for the glee with which he and his cabal laid waste to the Middle East.
Comparing Cheney and Trump is difficult. The one reminds us of the most evil and bloodthirsty leaders in history. The other resembles a nine-year old who’s never been toilet-trained and laughs as he twaddles around shitting on every expensive carpet he can find. The special place in Hell associated with that dolt is for the adult Republicans who continue to enable him.
To me, the bottom line is that Bush did not hate everything America stands for. He may have been a typical Republican but he wasn’t actively trying to ruin the world.
Trump has been actively trying to turn the world upside down. Unlike Bush, who knew he was no sooper sekret jenious, Trump is the literal embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. As such he will have the dubious honour of presiding over the greatest, avoidable loss of American lives ever.
The whole thing will be made worse by the fact that Trump supporters, and maybe the majority of the GOP, are in a cult that has their brains fucked with by Fox news on regular basis.
If we’re going by people pointlessly killed, LBJ is still in living memory, and his escalation of the war in Vietnam - based on a lie - killed more people than that. A LOT more people.
No one ever wants to nominate him, and yet Vietnam was indubitably the biggest military catastrophe in American history.
Cheney wasn’t President so let’s get this back on topic. Cheney may have been one of the true drivers of the Iraq War but so was Paul Wolfowitz and do we drag him in to this too? The President was George W. Bush. The buck stopped with him. If Dick Cheney did something awful, that is still on George W. Bush.
GWB was a dreadful President, one of the worst there ever was. Trump is worse. Miles worse. Trump’s Presidency threatens the constitutional fabric of his country, and I’m not exaggerating; the USA is in a much worse civic state than most people are willing to admit.
I don’t think I ever thought of Bush as being deliberately hateful and immoral. Whereas Trump is fucking hateful and ignorant at his very core and it radiates out around him like a poisonous cloud. We are fortunate to the extent that Trump’s worst instincts are tempered by his sheer stupidity and incompetence.
Absolutely. For all his mistakes, GWB respected American institutions and I believe had what he thought were the best interests of the US at heart. He was not a racist, nor was he a grifter. DJT is both of these things and more. More importantly, he is a threat to democracy. By having absolute mind control over 25-30% of the population, he has forced Republicans to choose between serving the nation and serving the DJT base. By choosing the latter, Republicans are gleefully stepping on the gas as the car approaches the cliff. If Republicans win all branches of government this fall, then democracy is dead.
Bush had his share of utter incompetence, in the response to Katrina. I think there’s a basic issue with small-government conservatives and well-functioning government.
BTW, a new sign of this administration’s incompetence – they stopped maintaining the emergency ventilators in 2018, so thousands of them don’t work. It’s what happens when you hire toadies and incompetents for high-level government positions, and then fire them if they don’t kiss your ass sufficiently. So much institutional memory has been lost.