I’d say it has to be Bush, taking into account that the Iraq disaster set up at least half of the foreign policy problems the current maladministration is malhandling. Trump could not be as bad as he is without Bush having done the fuckery he done did.
Nothing the current president has done begins to compare to the disaster that was Iraq. :mad:
No contest, Trump hands down. I think he is arguably the worst US president in history. Bush II? I would go with him being in the bottom 5 for sure, but he’s not in Trump’s league, especially at this point in his presidency (i.e. 3 years in).
Ummm one second of googling reveals that 460,000 Iraqis died, both directly and indirectly as a result of the Iraq War, with 60% directly attributable to the war. That’s way beyond anything Trump has done or likely will do. That doesn’t even include the American lives lost obviously. Think of the damage he caused to that entire region that is still feeling the consequences, to America.
And that’s just one war, he started two and stretched the military so thin.
You could go on and on start talking about policies leading to the 2008 recession, I mean I think it’s no contest.
And hey don’t forget the Patriot Act too!!!
Ooh at first I thought it was a tough decision, but when I realized this would put us in late May 2003 for Bush, I had to go with Bush. Ignorant war criminal beats the narcissistic, corrupt. lying. incompetent authoritarian.
But it’s early yet. Sadly I think it’s entirely possible–especially with Bolton on his staff–that Trump will pull a stunt one of these days that might be as perfidious as the lies that pushed us to an endless war.
Not only was Bush worse, the response to his presidency was worse. He was popular, the media was supine, and Democrats went along with it all out of fear (and then lost the Senate anyways).
Tbh, I’m amazed that anyone is choosing Trump. Yeah, he’s an objectively terrible President, but Bush deliberately lied us into a war! Hundreds of thousands dead. Hundreds of billions wasted. And then the motherfucker has the gall to be all like “Hurr durr those weapons of mass destruction have gotta be round here somewhere!”
No. They aren’t, George. Because you made ‘em up!.
Trump may be a piece of shit, but Bush was a goddamn monster.
I’ve no idea if this applies to anybody, but the thread title asks you who is the worst but the poll question instructs you to “pick your poison” i.e choose the least worst from some unpalatable alternatives so some may have answered the poll “wrong”.
The Iraq War was probably the single worst mistake that either of them made. But Trump has made so, so many other mistakes that he wins on sheer quantity.
And putting a drunk rapist who will come up with any absurd ideological result he feels like with insane justification onto the Supreme Court is probably pretty close to the Iraq War.
I think his getting 2 people into the USSC and, potentially more is by far the thing that puts Trump over the top. And we don’t know what else might happen before the guy is gone.
Oh, and let’s not forget the treason, either.
(And yes, I’m usually the one who’s pointing out that treason is very strictly defined in the Constitution, and that most things people call treason aren’t. But we’ve got a guy who was involved with another country taking actions that that other country themselves call an act of war. It fits.)
Trump has not yet vomited in Japan like Bush Sr. 
He hasn’t lied under oath about getting a blowjob either. But I’m sure if he does, the SCOTUS will enshrine a new legal concept, “no-fault perjury”.
It’s worth recalling that Bush had been seeking a war with Iraq since before 9/11.
He and/or Cheney created the Office of Special Plans just to cherry-pick the evidence against Saddam.
There was never any meaningful evidence while Bush was in office that Saddam was on the way to having nukes, which didn’t stop Bush from telling us that “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
After Saddam opened his supposed WMD sites to our inspectors in early 2003, and they found nothing, Bush went ahead and invaded anyway.
And the invasion itself prioritized reaching Baghdad over securing alleged WMD sites to the extent that advancing troops that came across such sites left them unguarded, and by the time special units arrived to check them out, they’d have been looted to the ground.
Other than the exact wording of the “mushroom cloud” quote, that’s all from memory. Plenty more evidence of Bush’s bad intentions out there that I’ve long since forgotten.
Oh yeah: forgot Bush’s semantic games with Saddam and al-Qaeda, where he worked hard to leave the impression in people’s minds that they were in league, but was careful with his phrasing so that if you said that wasn’t true, his flacks would point out that he’d never actually said that, which he hadn’t. Just said things that made people think that.
Although he is trying to shit on China.
Yeah…This CBS news story from the time discusses this fact about what the weapons inspectors were finding: Inspectors Call U.S. Tips 'Garbage' - CBS News
That to me was one of the most damning parts of the whole thing because it really showed that, no, they didn’t believe their own hype…They knew that anything Saddam might have posed so little threat that it wasn’t even worth bothering to prevent them from getting into the hands of terrorists. They actually embarked on a campaign to take WMDs from someone who was a known control freak who the intelligence agencies judged as very unlikely to give / sell them to terrorists and put them in the hands of desperately impoverished people who would be more than happy to sell them to terrorists. So, either they were completely lying or they embarked on on a plan to keep WMDs out of terrorist hands that was only slightly less incompetent than if they had shipped WMDs directly to Bin Laden.
And, essentially noone called them on it. It was bizarre.
[Revisiting this is causing me some pause … I originally thought that the no-brainer answer was “Trump” but have to admit that my fading memory on how bad the Bush years were are causing me to look back with rose-colored glasses.]
Well in objective, absolute terms, what has Trump done that has actually harmed people?
He’s caused some hassle for non-U.S. citizen assylum seekers and illegal border crossers. You can *maybe *blame him for a handful of kids who died in detention without seeing their parents again - but frankly if those people were still in Mexico, the probability of one of their children dying is probably higher.
He’s vented a huge amount of hot air. The various “obstruction of justice” and “hiding his income/everyday tax fraud” crimes, while irritating, don’t really affect any American citizens on an everyday basis.
He’s passed another tax cut on the rich. This is accelerating the trend towards concentrating the wealth in the hands of the 1% - but it isn’t killing people directly.
He’s destabilized the ACA. This will kill thousands of Americans eventually but it hasn’t yet collapsed. Maybe a few hundred have died from the increased pool of uninsured.
And he’s said a bunch of hot air grandiose claims that were basically all lies - but anyone who trusts him and takes Trumps word for anything at this point deserves what they get.
Compared to the Iraq war, yeah, this is basically just a reality TV show set in the White House.
While we talk about whether or not he’s guilty of various federal crimes - and he is - none of them compare in consequences to the damage done by the Iraq war. So what if he obstructed a bit of justice against himself? By comparison this is practically a grade-school infraction compared to wasting a few trillion and 10k+ American* lives in a pointless war.
*don’t forget the far greater number of maimed Americans with damaged bodies and especially damaged brains as a result of injuries sustained.
And I’d say he’s trying to plunge it even lower, except I don’t think he’s capable of planning far enough ahead to be able to have such intent. Maybe when he was younger… nah. From every bit of information I’ve seen, he’s always been the kind of guy whose success comes from people refusing to admit that they have conned themselves rather than from any planning.
One of the things about American society which seem strange to people from other developed countries is the extent of distrust for the government and fear of the legal system: Trump’s government even distrusts itself, in a way and to an extent that had rarely been seen before. The short-term consequences may be (may be, it remains to be seen) less bad than the Irak war, but the size of the long-term damage, both internally and externally, is already worse than it was with all of Bush’s tenure.