The real negative legacy of Bush was his undying faith in markets and his refusal to engage in more stringent oversight - he’ll never be able to live that down.
I also think that Cheney was a proto-authoritarian with Trumpish tendencies, as evidenced by his reaction to Libby’s imprisonment. Cheney’s “Fuck you! I’m right mentality” is very much at the core of what is now the modern GOP.
On the flip side, he was humble enough and had enough integrity to accept he was wrong - on both Iraq and markets. He showed some flexibility and willingness to change once he was proven wrong. He took action to stop the bleeding during the financial crisis. The bulk of the credit for saving the economy goes to Democrats, but Bush gets some credit, IMO.
And as we’ve discussed elsewhere, say what you will about Bush, but I think it’s clear he cared about the job and the country. He did what he genuinely believed to be in the best interests of the country. He was wrong about many things, but his heart was probably in the right place most of the time. I feel that way now, and I felt that way even when it wasn’t easy to.
I dunno, I think in the evil shadow behind the throne Olympics Putin beats Cheney by a length and a half.
As to the main question it comes down to circumstances. Trump is more evil and more incompetent, but Bush’s time in office had more leeway to do harm. Try if you dare to imagine what Trump would do post 9/11 given a populace filled with patriotic fervor and Jingoism. Bush tried to make it clear that he was not engaged a war against Islam. Trump would start a holy crusade that would make the Iraq/Afghan war look like a game of tiddlywinks.
The only thing that is keeping Trumps war casualties down is that the US is so tired of conflict that he knows it would poll badly.
No, pretty sure its still the war. I’ll give you Trump is the worst person who has ever been president, but as far as what they’ve actually done he’s still not come close to doing worse than Iraq or Vietnam.
I’ve never agreed with the idea that Bush was being manipulated by evil people in his administration. I feel Bush was in charge but just assumed that “gosh shucks” demeanor because he thought it played well with the public. He decided to let people like Cheney play the role of bad cop to his good cop.
Trump is incompetent in ways that Bush was not. It’s Trump’s incompetence that’s his real failing. Sure, he’s crooked. But Nixon and Johnson were crooked. However they were smart enough to still do their job.
A year or two ago, I started a thread asking if someday down the road, America would have a president that would make people wish for the “good old days of Trump.”
The idea was scoffed at. But check back again in a decade or two…
You might as well lay Vietnam at Kennedy’s feet. He had already got the pieces in place. If he had not been shot, he would have moved ahead in almost exactly the same way. Johnson only finished what he started.
Is that actually valid? It looked like Johnson expanded Vietnam a lot more than JFK expected too. It’s been a long time since I read on that subject, but I don’t recall an intent to expand our presence like Johnson did from Kennedy.
That lets Bush off the hook too easily. He had the proverbial hard-on for Saddam since his daddy was the president and couldn’t wait to wreak havoc on Iraq. 9/11 gave him the opening he wanted and blaming Cheney wrongly lessens his culpability. Did Bush care about the collateral damage? Hell no. Mission accomplished.
Kennedy already expanded the US presence in Vietnam considerably, against the counsel of his predecessor, and his people had been destabilizing Saigon by means of trying to make it more favorable to their goals. I am not aware of any convincing evidence that shows Kennedy as significantly more pacifist or better at diplomacy as compared to Johnson. There is simply no reason to imagine that the Vietnam War would not have escalated under Kennedy – it might have ramped up a little more gradually, but by the late '60s, it would have been indistinguishable. Because, communism: bad, must be pushed back. No president could seen as being weak opposite the USSR et al.
Only because most of us would prefer *anyone *who’s been President during our lifetimes to the Orange Abomination. If Richard Nixon could rise from the dead and immediately displace Trump in the Oval Office, I’d be all for it, and Nixon was evil.
Speaking of Nixon, if our metric is unnecessary deaths worldwide, Nixon beats both Trump and Dubya: he and Kissinger sabotaged LBJ’s peace talks, and kept the Vietnam war going for another four years.
IIRC, just in terms of American deaths, he’s responsible for about half the names inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. And of course a shitload of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian deaths: we can argue about just how responsible Nixon is for the Khmer Rouge, whether the ‘secret bombing’ was merely a necessary but not a sufficient condition for its rise to power, but he pretty much destabilized the region, and the killing fields were one consequence of that.
Well, now Trump’s incompetence is his real failing. Pre-coronavirus, it was his silver lining.
I’ve often joked that while he 's evil enough to be the Antichrist, he isn’t competent enough. But still a pretty good proof of concept that the real thing would go over well here (ETA: and who would be his followers), if I believed in any of that crap.
What action did he take? I give him credit for not getting in the way, which is better than Trump would do. But he initiated nothing. He did not lead.
During his term he would not admit to any mistakes, just like Trump. Did he explicitly admit to them after? Deep down he knows he screwed up which is why he’s being so quiet. Which is better than Trump, who will never admit to any mistakes even if he goes to where he belongs, jail.
Kennedy deserves some blame, and it’s quite possible things would have gone the way they did had he not been murdered. But here’s the thing; he DID get shot. He died before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, 95% of the escalation of the war, the Pentagon Papers, the works. That was on LBJ’s watch, was a product of LBJ’s policies, and is LBJ’s responsibility. Nixon was vastly more responsible than Kennedy too.
For all that, the failures of Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon were failured of competence and vision and understanding. Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon all wanted a better America, and all had policy victories to show for it. I can blame LBJ and Nixon for Vietnam, but I also cannot deny LBJ the Civil Right Act, or deny Nixon SALT or the EPA. Similarly, opne cannot deny Bush 2.0 the success of PEPFAR. Those things happened at least in part because those men did want to do something good.
What actual success has Trump had? Even the White House’s list of accomplishments are mostly facts related to the economy growing, all of which has now gone to shit, and none of which really had much to do with any Trump policy. There is no signature achievement, because Trump never intended on there being one, and he never intended on there being one because Donald Trump doesn’t care about the USA, and doesn’t care about Americans. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter if you were talking about Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush, all Presidents wanted on some level for Americans to be better off. Trump does not. Couldn’t care less.
Trump’s first reaction to this crisis was “meh, it’s just like the flu” because he felt if no one made a big deal about it it wouldn’t hurt his numbers. Someone told him tens of thousands of people a year die of seasonal flu - not really true, but that’s what he was told so he bought it, and concluded that many people could die from COVID-19 and no one would criticize him. It never mattered to him that tens of thousands more could die because why would that matter to him? Only when it became apparent this was a threat to his popularity did he care.
Depends on how you define “success”. The Rs’ core agenda for the last four decades has been to destroy the government in pursuit of some sort of anarchocapitalist plutocratic ideal, and you cannot deny that Individual-ONE has done a yeoman’s job of fucking up and over the government. He literally has succeeded greatly in moving toward the ultimate goal of the right wing.
In terms of what average Americans want and need, that goal is not at all beneficial to them. But we well know that even average Americans are quite stupid, or at least have been trained to adhere to some seriously stupid paradigms, and it is not at all hard for the leaders of either polarity to “know what is best” for them (and, ipso facto, to accuse the other guys of being arrogant know-it-alls).
We need a consistent set of criteria. What’s the bar?
Reagan and W were at least able to form cabinets and put some form of government in place. Reagan appointed more folks to deliberately destroy our government than W. But Reagan had a competent cabinet in place to fill in the valleys caused by his roller coaster administration. And the moderate GHW Bush stepped in to put the country back together without blaming Reagan. W had a cabinet and Cheney as Prime Minister. We may not like what some Presidents have done, but at least they governed.
The trouble with Donald is that he is President in name only. Trump has been unable to form a government. He does not have a chief of staff or a cabinet or a functional link to the legislative branch. His public utterances are like the thread posts in a low level political forum. Just the obvious, coupled with personal attacks.
Trump now owns the perpetual title of worst President ever. It may be the only thing he ever earned.
