Trump has been in office for about 17 agonizing months. In that time, he’s done a lot: cozied up to dictators; enacted ruinous tariffs; bolstered white supremacists; called for the prosecution of his political opponents for crimes up to and including treason; locked migrant children in concentration camps; engaged in all manner of corrupt self-dealing; obstructed justice; undermined the rule of law; lied about everything, big and small, every day; turned his back on NATO allies; provoked a confrontation with Iran; made the US a laughingstock; and other things I can’t think of right now. That’s quite a record.
Bush’s rap sheet in the first 17 months of his horrible tenure is arguably shorter, but contains some doozies of its own. Off the top of my head, Bush: ignored warnings about Al Qaeda in the runup to the September 11 attacks; took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan, allowing Bin Laden to escape; failed to manage the postwar period in Afghanistan; started an unjustified war in Iraq based on a steady stream of lies; used appeals to patriotism to stifle dissent; signed a tax cut during wartime; and other things I can’t think of right now. That’s quite a record in its own right.
Looking just at the first year and a half of their terms (to keep things fair), which was worse? Use whatever metrics you like to define “worse”.
They are both horrible, horrible presidents and people. Bush wins points for maintaining superficial decorum and professionalism. But his political competence allowed him to achieve more of his awful goals than Trump has been able to so far. Trump is a thoroughly despicable human, and I think he’d be the runaway winner of this contest if he were competent enough to do all the things he imagines himself doing in his fevered dreams.
This is a tough call for me, but I’m going with Bush. While Trump is more personally reprehensible, he hasn’t racked up Bush’s body count. Sure, Trump is getting ready to send troops to the Middle East to counter an allegedly increasing threat from Iran, but we haven’t started killing people there yet. By this point in his administration, Bush had already ordered the deaths of untold tens of thousands of people for no very good reason. Trump is hastening the end of American hegemony, and as a patriot, I am honestly pained to see this happening in my lifetime. But as a humanist, I have to say that killing a few hundred thousand people for no very good reason is still worse. American hegemony would have ended eventually anyway. But we didn’t have to start that fucking war.
At this point Bush hadn’t yet started the disastrous Iraq war, so my vote is for Trump, easily. Ask me again in a year and I’ll re-evaluate based on what Trump has done.
I had the timing wrong (as did the OP) – at this point, Bush had actually started the Iraq War. With that in mind, I’ll change my vote to Bush, but it’s close. Trump has done an incredible amount of harm to the country, but I don’t think it’s quite Iraq-War level harm, at least not yet.
Bush might have done more to hurt us (short term) but Trump’s very existence in that office is an obscenity of previously unseen proportions. Plus, his incompetence and ignorance will probably cause more long term damage.
The hard part is, both Presidencies to this point had/will have long-term repercussions.
We can see those of Bush, but with Trump, we really don’t know how bad it’s going to get on account of what’s already been set in motion.
Trump’s unquestionably done more damage to our own government, having put his lickspittles in charge of the entire Executive Branch, and with Mitch’s help, loaded the Federal judiciary with right-wing ideologues and corporate lackeys.
But between Iraq and North Korea, I’ve got to give it to Bush. His abandonment of the Agreed Framework (“appeasement!”) resulted in North Korea resuming and ultimately fulfilling its quest for nuclear weapons. And of course our invasion of Iraq not only resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and millions in exile, but removed the main counterweight to Iran’s power in the region, resulted in the rise of ISIS, and generally destabilized the region and created an international refugee crisis.
That’s a hard record to beat. Congrats, Dubya. Miss you yet? Fuck off, twerp: we should have impeached you and Cheney simultaneously back in 2007 while we had the chance. And the next Democratic President should open the books on the Bush Administration, and prosecute any crimes that the statute of limitations hasn’t run out on yet.
Torture. I somehow forgot that we tortured a lot of people.
I’m a little surprised that Trump is so far ahead. It’s early in the polling, but I thought it would be closer. A good case can be made for either, certainly.
Bush made mistakes but his mistakes were within normal bounds.
The Iraq war was bad, but I don’t agree with the statement “Bush lied people died”. Instead I think Bush truly believed what he was saying but was suffering badly from rose colored glasses and confirmation bias. I disagreed with Bush on just about everything, but I never got the impression that he wasn’t taking actions that he thought were in the best interest of the country. I never felt that Bush would actively try to make life worse for a segment of the American public purely out of spite. Nor was I concerned that he would sew such division and corruption such that what had previously been unthinkable became normalized and that it may take a generation for our government to return to normal functioning.
It is not so much the action of Trump that bothers me, but the precedent he sets and the legacy he leaves.
Yes. At the very least, Trump is utterly indifferent to the security, prosperity, and welfare of his own nation—all that matters to him, by the evidence of his words and actions, is his own wealth and status.
Add to that Trump’s nutty ideas about trade and tariffs, and the ongoing and future damage represented by the partisan-hack judges (and Justices) being installed by his Administration, and you have a president that will do more cumulative harm to the nation than any other president could hope to accomplish.
As a non-American, a Canadian, it’s not even close. Trump’s rise has leveled the American moral high ground. Internationally, he has utterly devastated the US’s prestige, credibility, and ‘standing’. Merkel now includes the US with Russia and China as threats up to which the EU must stand. We are far from alone in Canada in loathing him. (Okay, he is big in Budapest)
A generation to fix? Maybe domestically. But from the perspective of those outside the US, where we once looked to a shining-city-on-a-hill, we see a moated dark castle. He has changed the eyes of the world for generations and they may never see the same again.
I don’t think Trump is indifferent to the state of the nation - it strongly affects his own re-electability, if nothing else, and so he has reason to care about it even if nothing else. He tweets all the time about the stock market hitting highs or job growth or U.S. GDP growth. So yes, he does care about the economy, even if his ideas aren’t good.
I think “cares about the economy” is overly-generous to him. He cares about positive headlines (and regards ‘stock market up’ as one of the most positive).
So long as he can bribe anyone who’s hurt by his awful ideas (such as farmers harmed by his tariffs), he’s content. To me that doesn’t qualify as “cares about the economy.”