Really, as bad as GWB was, it’s quite astonishing to think that a man who called Islam a religion of peace after 9/11, pushed for sensible immigration reform that included a path to citizenship for the undocumented, and had a racially diverse group of cabinet officials and advisers, could once have been the Republican standard-bearer.
Trump and MAGA were the “RINOs” but they flipped the party to not even pretend to have any principles, and now GOP=TRUMP and everyone with even slight adherence to previously modern Republican policies are now “RINOs.” If Trump if is a master at anything (setting all ethics and principles aside), it is branding/marketing. He accomplished a pretty significant re-branding and sold a lot of merch to the cult.
This was going on long before Trump rode the golden escalator, and is essentially the endgame for the strategy that started with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America”. Trump was just a hop-on onto this staircar, and this trend of sneaking a proto-fascist movement under the skirts of the GOP and rebranding traditional Republicans as “RINOs” was sufficiently evident as to make it into a popular entertainment over a decade ago:
Stranger
I often think what a better place the world would have been if West Georgia College had ignored Newt’s deficiencies and just tenured the mutherfucker instead of firing him for his poor scholarship. For the good of the country.
Consciously or unconsciously, there pretty much had to be a part of GWB that was – metaphorically – holding Trump’s beer during and after 45’s Presidency.
Whatever else Trump did, he definitely scrubbed a great deal of the tarnish off of George W. Bush’s lackluster-to-disastrous Presidency.
Why get in the way of that?
It’s similar to how Sarah Palin tends to benefit from the presence of MTG and Lauren Boebert.
Yeah as best as I can tell, and I live about 4 miles from where he does, he keeps a surprisingly low profile now that he’s no longer in politics. You don’t read about him in the local papers, you don’t hear him saying anything on the news, etc. At the very most, you occasionally see something in the paper that references him in relation to various restaurants in the city, or maybe about him and Laura at some charity event or other.
Add to that Mitt Romney’s full-throated condemnation of Trump, along with a lot of other old-guard Republicans who have said similar things, and I think you’re absolutely right.
Yeah, we’re seeing two things going on at the same time. One, the whole grooming of the media and the message to drive their base and susceptible viewers further away from the center and toward a fearful, culture-war viewpoint, and two, Trump and his goons sneaking that proto-fascist and populist movement in and co-opting that media grooming and branding. Kind of reminds me a little bit of those ants that get a certain fungus that then drives the ant in a way to reproduce more fungus.
Trump really supercharged the merch side of things, though.
It just seems weird that W is the only other living Republican who has been President. He is actually a few weeks younger than Individual-ONE – maybe being in his late 70s has made him even mellower.
It looks like most of the former national-stage Republicans went missing from the Republican convention. Pence, Romney, Ryan and Quayle were not there, and I see no mention of Palin, Cheney or Kemp. The Republican Party seems to be shedding its past.
Dubya being, relatively speaking, not that bad of a Republican president is another of those things me from 20 years ago would have openly laughed at hearing and assumed someone was taking the piss. Something that would have sounded so absurd on its face as to not be taken seriously. Like a Republican presidential contender being applauded instead of disowned for mocking the military record of his contender for the Republican nomination because he spent 5 1/2 years as a POW. Or Republicans openly supporting Russian military expansionism.
To be fair, the last Republican presidents other than W and Trump were GHW Bush and Reagan. Bush the Elder was only 64 when he became president, but if he were still alive today, he’d be 100; Reagan was just shy of his 70th birthday when he became president, and would now be 113 if he were still alive.
We only have three living Democrats who are former presidents, as well, and one of those is Jimmy Carter, who is 5 1/2 weeks shy of 100, himself.
George W Bush should probably thank Trump for no longer being the worst president in history.
It’s a funny sort of thought experiment, played out if real life: “Mr. President, are there any conditions–any exceptionally vile and corrupt candidate of your Party, or any exceptionally qualified candidate of the Other Party–such that you would enthusiastically support the Other Party’s candidate over your own?”
And we’ve gotten an answer in real time. A very scary answer.
GWB was not obviously the worst president before T. There were a few 19th century presidents who were pretty bad (Fillmore and Buchanan, for example) and it’d be a matter of argument about who was worst. T has removed the need for that argument.
OK, but can we agree that until the election of Trump, GWB was the worst president in living memory?
Definitely.
Dick Cheney has been openly opposed to Trump.
Now, that was at least partially in support of his daughter, but if he wanted to keep a low profile and not make enemies of MAGA he’d have kept his mouth shut. I can’t find anything more recent, but I think it’s fair to count him as a former ranking Republican who has taken a stance against him.
There’s no real metric here, but I say Nixon. And there‘s a lot to this:
Bush and Kerry: clones when it comes to the military
Bush should give Harris a low-key endorsement.
He could certainly get away with doing so – but then, couching it like that presumes Bush assumes any kind of political risk at all. He’s been out of the fray long enough that the current alliance of Trumpists really have no way of touching him.
The reason I said “low key” is that if voters thought Bush and Harris were on the same page, it would push some over to Jill Stein or Cornel West. Bush is still too controversial for a splashy joint appearance to be a good idea. But a press release where Bush says he is planning to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket could not hurt.
Or he might say vote for Individual-ONE, so that I look like less of a PoS.