I’m reading Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country and while I think Michael Moore has an agenda to push, I think the book is probably an accurate, if satirical piece.
I’m sort of changing my mind about rating the presidents here.
As much as I would desire to see Trump dead last on every list of presidential performance because I know how much that would piss Dolt 45 off, I’m thinking that I agree with Cenk on the Young Turks that GWB was even worse. He was a war criminal. Cenk said, “Trump was more dangerous to our Democracy, but Bush (II) got more people killed.”
Body count means nothing, Honest Abe got a lot more people killed too. Attempting to kill our democracy is a much, much bigger crime than anything GWB did. What would the body count of US citizens be if Trump had successfully overthrew the government? How much pain and misery to the 52% the didn’t elect him would he have caused? It’s not even a close comparison between the two.
Even if you wanted to count the bodies as a measure of worst president (which I agree if a poor metric), I would lay most of the US COVID deaths a Trumps feet which would surpass American deaths under Bush if not foreign deaths.
Mmm, not really. Bush and his bunch lied about who was behind 9/11 in order to start a war with Iraq, both for oil profits and to shield the Saudi Royal Family from investigations about Bush family dealings with them.
Bush missed a golden opportunity for unifying the country, mainly because he had Cheney’s hand up his ass during most of his first term. By the time he realized that he was being manipulated by malignant people, that chance was long gone. Trump, on the other hand, rarely took anyone else’s advice, much to everyone’s detriment. Trump also fomented insurrection and treason. I’d say Trump was far worse.
Quantitative nitpick: I think it’s highly unlikely that the number of avoidable US COVID deaths that can be attributed specifically to Trump’s mostly stupid and destructive approach to pandemic policy is anywhere near as high as 600,000, or even “most” of the total.
Analyses like this one suggest the figure is more like 40% of total deaths, or something under 300,000.
Admittedly even that is a catastrophically high number of Americans to lose to avoidable policy fuckups. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we wouldn’t still have lost hundreds of thousands of lives to COVID even without being hamstrung by the stupid and incompetent Trump presidency.
If it were a Pay-Per-View event, I’d dub it “Stupid vs. Evil.”
I have absolutely no doubt that GWB meant well, loved his country, and had “good” (if not pure – possibly finishing what Daddy started in Iraq) intentions.
Bush was the consummate “post turtle:”
“When you’re driving down a country road and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle. You know he didn’t get up there by himself. He doesn’t belong there; you wonder who put him there; he can’t get anything done while he’s up there; and you just want to help the poor, dumb thing down.”
He was naïve enough to be f***ed over by the Neocon/PNAC set, and insulated enough to not hear dissenting voices.
Trump is simply a cartoon supervillain but with profound real-world consequences.
You have to inform, enlighten, and persuade a GWB. You have to defend against a DJT. I think the latter is much harder, particularly when the latter built such a Rogue’s Gallery of cohorts and subordinates.
I sometimes wonder whether – had journalists not been cowed by GWB’s jingoism and propaganda in the run-up to the two wars – whether his cronies could have been defused and disarmed.
But there was truly a powerful cabal supporting him. Just one example:
Bush was a bit of a bumbling fool, but those who served him were anything but. I think we were lucky that DJT got rid of the competent elements of his administration, most of whom seemed to be opposed to many of his schemes. Had they been persuadable, they may have proved formidable.
Yeah, it’s hard to say how many of the Covid deaths to blame on Trump. Covid (and our responses to it) never should have been anywhere near as politicized as it was and is. It’s one of many ways in which our nation has become increasingly divided, living in different realities. Trump’s presidency was both a cause of, and a result of, such division.
It was a bit more compliated than that. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were all signatories to the principles of a neoconservative think tank called “Project for the New American Century” which advocated for the US adopting a stance of “benevolent global hegemony”. There’s a strong argument that they used 9/11 as an excuse to convince the Bush II admin to overthrow Hussein and plant a permanent American presence in the Middle East, and that W was more of a patsy than a full participant. Not an exoneration of W by any means, though.
W at least, immediately after 9/11, drew a strong distinction between the terrorists and the vast majority of law-abiding Muslims in America at a time when violence against American Muslims could have exploded into a much worse situation than it did. Can you imagine if trump had been president at that time?
To echo what others have said, it depends on whether you’re comparing the Bush Administration vs. the Trump Administration, or GWB as President vs. DJT as President, or GWB as human being vs. DJT as human being. And perhaps on whether you’re comparing what they did directly, or including all the indirect results of what they said and did.
I agree – Trump’s policy choices, his public skepticism and “it will magically go away soon” comments undoubtedly made matters much worse, but even with a strong response, we would have still had many cases and many deaths, particularly in the early months of the pandemic, where the medical community was still learning how best to treat the ill and prevent spread.
Had HRC won the 2016 election, and even if her administration had taken an aggressive stance against COVID from the start, the loss of several hundred thousand American lives to it would have been a point that would have been hammered on by the GOP candidate last fall, and she probably would have lost re-election due to it.
By the end of his last term, during the financial crisis, Bush knew he was in over his head and allowed the experts to set financial policy. They could have done better, but they did avoid a total meltdown. Plus, he is a humble ex-President.
Trump never knew or cared that he was wrong, and is just as much of an asshole now as before.
And while Bush certainly lied, it was nowhere close to what Trump does.
I honestly believe that no one, outside of people who are/were actually dictators, are/were worse than Trump. In fact, I honestly believe that, if Trump had the power and opportunity, he would be every bit as bad as any one of them.
I would dispute the notion that Bush had “good intentions” or indeed any clear intentions at all other than to the the cool fratboy of presidents, and he handed over so much of the executive authority to Dick Cheney so he could do cool stuff like land a fighter on an aircraft carrier that he essentially eschewed responsibility. That the allowed Cheney and Rumsfeld to turn the invasion of Afghanistan into a nation-building exercise, and then turned around and do the same thing in Iraq without understanding anything about the actual intentions behind it speaks to just how poor of a president he was; leaders as critical questions and demand accountability, both from those around them and from themselves. I defy anyone to find material evidence of Bush taking responsibility for the errors of his administration or holding anyone accountable.
That being said, while George W. Bush was a terrible president, Donald J. Trump is a fundamentally rotten human being in every possible way who was incapable of even doing the simple task of consoling the families of fallen soldiers without turning it into a celebration of him or an opportunity to whine about how unfairly the media was treating him. Bush could at least appear to be presidential and didn’t make a concerted effort to besmirch and destroy people who disagreed with him, while Trump puts all of his twittery effort into destroying “his enemies” (e.g. everyone who didn’t vote for him, any media personalities not giving him fawning coverage, people who left his administration in disgust at his incompetence and corruption, and Cardi B, who is probably the only legitimate default enemy of every living person).
I don’t want either one of them as president, but I’d be willing to sit down to lunch with Bush and endure him for forty minutes. I woudn’t want to share the same zip code with Trump.
As for “a somewhat-decent understanding of how things worked,” I don’t think any president since Johnson has really had that. I think Johnson made a lot of terrible mistakes but there is no question he knew how to work the system to his ends, and also knew when it was time to pack up his bags and leave. Obama knew how Constitutional governance was supposed to work but I don’t think he fully understood when going into office how much dark money and influence had on actual policy and ended up defaulting to accepting the status quo as unmovable in too many ways. Biden clearly understands how things work (or don’t, in many cases) but it is unclear how well that knowledge is going to serve him with such divisiveness even within his own party and in the government as a whole. But Bush neither knew or cared about the details of government and the executive; he just wanted to be President and have people listen to him say cool stuff once in a while.
Look at this speech and ask if you could imagine Trump in a million years making the same remarks the morning after Biden won the election. (Granted, it wasn’t the same as if Kerry had beaten Bush, but the point being, Trump hasn’t got even 1% the class of Bush, or 0.5% the class of Obama)
