Just watched the Boy Boy video on George Bush’s Masterclass, and they made me think about which U.S. President was actually worse.
Trump. He tried to overthrow our democracy.
Okay but Bush actually stole a presidential election.
What?
Bush sued to stop a recount in Florida that would have likely led to Gore winning the 2000 presidential election. A conservative Supreme Court majority sided with Bush and stopped the recount. It makes Trump’s whole “STOP THE COUNT!” look amateurish in comparison. Bush actually was able to stop the count and got away with it.
Gore didn’t want Americans to start questioning the legitimacy of our democracy so he conceded. The rally around the flag effect after 9/11 helped quash any further criticisms of how Bush came to office.
The same assholes were involved both times. Roger Stone walking free is a symptom of national failure.
People like to say this, and I get it, I get the controversy, and I get why, but Florida was a statistical tie. A thousand recounts would have ended at the same spot of more infighting. The supreme Court was conservative leaning and decided in favor of the conservative to no one’s surprise. If the supreme Court was 5-4 liberal, Gore would have won.
The whole issue is so much more two sided than people realize. For example, the person who invented the butterfly ballots was a Democrat politician.
I am not personally in favor of the court’s ruling, I wish Gore had won. The world would be a MUCH better place without GWB having won the presidency.
When Bush stops a recount he’s stealing an election, but when Trump wants a recount he’s also trying to steal an election?
The Idiot yelled “stop counting!” every time it looked like he was ahead.
Get the fuck out of here with this grade-school fumbling for how you imagine contradictions work.
His handling of Covid and literally willfully allowing it to become a pandemic is far far worse than a failed insurrection.
That is a good thing though. America is trash, and so are you.
Oh no. Lemmygrad is leaking.
Way to downplay warcrimes and actual wars 👏👏👏
Nobody who understands what Bush did thinks Trump is worse.
Edit: ITT- People justifying senseless wars
No one is downplaying what Bush did, we’re accentuating how excruciatingly bad Trump’s actions were. See you comprehend that Bush’s crimes were horrible, you’re simply incapable of understanding that Trump’s were much, much worse.
Many executives get their countries embroiled in foreign conflicts. Few actively attempt to subvert their own government upon their dismissal; they literally are the worst of the worst, and your inability to fathom this is either feigned or revealing.
The US deserves to fall, and I’m glad trump did so much damage on his way out.
lol someone just turned 13. that’s cute lil’ edge lord, your future is fucked regardless of politics.
Everyone with a brain KNOWS trump is worse.
I’ll say the same thing to you as I did the other guy.
What until you hear about the war crimes of authoritarians. Just recently we have Assad gassing his own people, Russia stealing children, stealing land, and filling mass graves in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia murdering a journalist with a hacksaw. Bush may have started an illegitimate war, but the US military is comparatively very good when it comes to avoiding civilian casualties.
I feel like while bush was a much worse president then most people realize, with some of his policies and things like the patriot act still in effect and gumming up the works, trump did more damage in erroding the facade of democracy and empowering fanatics
Exactly: Bush pushed through evil policy that eroded rights and committed war crimes and such, but Trump attacked the very structure of the government.
Bush was bad in the way most world leaders and governments are, trump was impeached twiced and faced no consequences.
Isn’t the Patriot Act void back in 2020?
I believe so. However, the NSA’s mass surveillance programs still are authorized under section 702 of FISA which is another Bush era law.
Which is a good thing. Liberals pretending Bush wasn’t so bad, is what is going to allow fascism to win.
There’s no comparison. Bush has a much higher body count and was a more effective imperialistic mass-murderer. He certainly did his part to empower fanatics – the wAr oN tErROr got all those racist bloodthirsty chuds baying for blood. As for eroding the facade of democracy, I don’t know what you can call stealing the 2000 election and then ramming through unpopular wars other than proof that America has never been a democracy.
Bush did immense permanent damage – the millions dead by his policies and the aftershocks will never come back to life.
Trump just rode the wave.
People who think Trump was as bad or worse than Bush are just telling on themselves that they don’t think nonwhite people living outside the imperial core are fully human.
Speaking as a Canadian, the Bush presidency was certainly wince-inducing. I was genuinely surprised he got re-elected after that clusterfuck of a first term. By the end of the 2nd, I was fairly convinced the best days of America were behind it.
But the difference between him and Trump is the wounds were more self-inflicted on the country with Bush. Still not great for Canada, whose fortunes rise and fall on what happens on the other side of the border.
But Trump had a genuine animosity for freedom-loving, democracy-respecting American allies and a love for oppressive dictatorships. He tore up trade agreements, levelled tariffs, etc. against Canada and Europe while advancing diplomacy in person in the likes of North Korea.
And on a more social level, he poisoned public discourse and stoked right-wing authoritarianism all over the world. I have family members I can’t talk to anymore. And the lunatic fringe came out of the woodwork under his term. We even had a mosque shooter here in Canada who was quite candid about Trump being his inspiration.
Within the US, Americans hate Americans with a passion. What a mess. Another civil war is not out of the question. As such, I am coming down on Trump being far, far worse.
Thank you for your perspective.
You think Canada is in favor of democracy and freedom? You must be joking
I think all those things are good. Trump didn’t cause any of those, he exposed them to naive liberals like you.
I agree with lots of what you said, but lots not pretend like Quebec doesn’t already have an existing culture of Islamophobia and racism.
Reagan. He set the conservative party and the USA on a dark path where Bush and Trump were the inevitable result.
I would argue Nixon really started that path with his Southern Strategy. Reagan, Bush 2, and Trump were all consequences of Nixon
Watergate overshadows how Nixon’s Vietnam War inflation started the death of the American middle class. In 1968, a High School graduate with a union job could expect to buy a house and a car with one salary. By 1976, two incomes was the norm for lower income families, and it was enshrined by the time Reagan/Bush Sr. were done.
Agreed, but Reagan popularized the ideas that it is elitist to expect a president to be competent, that complex legislative topics should make sense at the dinner table, and that government is the enemy of freedom. Both Nixon and Reagan were willing to trade in bigotry for political gain, and both were the sort of cynical “me-first” conservatives that taught boomers to mortgage the future. But Reagan had the charisma that Nixon lacked.
Reagan for the USA and Thatcher for us in the UK. The things they did still have impact to this day.
Great answer
Well said. A product of the past.
After Bush’s presidency I thought “Phew, glad that’s over. I bet that’s the worst president I’ll experience in my lifetime.” After nine months of Trump in office I was longing for the good old days of Dubya and Chainsaw Cheney.
I think Trump will have done the most damage when the dust settles. We’ve had almost 20 years to see the effects Bush had on our country but only about 3 years since Trump left office. He packed the Supreme Court, made people proud to be racists, destroyed our electoral system, gutted the EPA, sold our secrets to our enemies, and made fascism popular.
Bush started a war in which US massacred over 6 million people. It’s absolutely incredible how Americans absolutely don’t give a shit about all the atrocities their deplorable regime does around the globe
According to the WHO, nearly 7 million people worldwide have died to date due to COVID-19. Aside from just mortality, COVID-19 has caused massive shockwaves across economic systems across the world that irreversibly impacted hundreds of millions of people. I won’t pretend all of COVID deaths were caused by Trump, but you can bet your ass that a significant number of them, my personal extended family included, died because he politicized the virus and treated it like it was no big deal.
Blaming covid on Trump is quite the stretch given that there was no tangible difference between the approach that Trump and Biden admins took towards handling the pandemic. The media just stopped reporting the deaths on daily basis when democrats got into power. US deaths account for around 1.1 million, and a large portion of those deaths happened under democrats.
The reason people died was due to lack of a social safety net, lack of sick days, lack of free healthcare, and so on. Saying that people died because Trump politicized the virus is frankly nonsensical.
What percentage of US deaths of Covid occurred under Trump compared to under Biden?
I agree with a lot of what you say but our electoral system was fkd way before him. People were already proud of being racist he just gave them a microphone. The EPA still gets me though. We have been moving more and more to a fascist government for years now since the event of 2001 when we gave up privacy for security.
I think it’s more what happened under the cover of Trump, ie what Republicans do, which is where the damage was in Trump’s presidency. He was basically a smokescreen and scapegoat for all manner of interests, but as an individual almost completely vapid aside from his narcissistic drive for attention, which all mainstream politics was more than happy to provide him with.
Bush was an absolute monster, but Trump literally broke brains. America will never be the same.
Trump tried to start a civil war, overthrow democracy, and install himself as king. Trumpism is tearing the country apart and trying so very hard to burn it all down. There’s no contest.
*Another different way to word it: Bush made terrible decisions. Trump wants to burn it all down.
Potentially? Trump. Factually? Bush. However, to be honest, the American political system seems to be fucked up to the point it doesn’t resemble a democracy. Currently, their population suffers from this situation with poverty, addiction to drugs, a corrupt healthcare system, inability to own a home, shitty jobs, etc. So, it really doesn’t matter too much which one is worse. Biden or nobody else can fix this from within. But yeah, a second term of Trump would be definitely catastrophic and would compete with Bush’s levels of destruction. Right now, the only thing containing Trump is his short term period in power.
The most depressing and convincing theory I’ve read about the state of American democracy is Sarah Kendzior’s book “They Knew”.
The tl;dr is that the US is ungovernable. The ruling classes don’t have the will to fix the economic and cultural divides that split the country and there’s an unspoken understanding between them all that the only way is down.
So they’re letting it run its course, letting the weakest fall into the gears and skimming off what wealth they can, to insulate themselves from the inevitable chaos.
I like Gaslit nation.
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It’s hard to say. Bush Jr. gave us both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both of which stretched into decades and cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, however, I’n not sure that any other Republican wouldn’t have done the same. Within 48 hours of 9/11, it seemed like they were already discussing how to tie it to Iraq, which made it seem like it was the plan all along. 9/11 just provided a convenient excuse. Those conflicts also stretched across multiple presidencies, Obama didn’t actually end either one.
Trump, on the other hand, could potentially spell the end of the US as we know it. The court cases against him give me some hope that he himself will be stamped out, but even without him, his followers are still just as dumb and malicious and they’ve infested every nook and cranny of the government like maggots.
The deeper problem is the Russian propaganda machine that helped a dipshit like Trump rise to power in the first place, which is what makes Ukraine so important. If we can break Russia’s back, we can potentially disrupt it at its source, but maybe the vacuum would just get filled by some other foreign power looking to destabilize the US. Trump is a symptom of a deeper issue in America, that someone like him even had a chance in the first place. If anything, we actually got lucky he’s as incompetent as he is and that we’re not already living under a dictatorship.
It’s not just Russian propaganda unfortunately.
Conservative media as a whole is in a self destructive feedback loop in which -> the craziest lunatics and the angriest ideas get the most market engagement -> thus the media gives them the biggest platform, so they can make the most money -> thus those guys get elected and get talk shows-> thus rewarding both politicians and media companies for spreading anger and madness -> that made us money -> DO IT 10 TIMES MORE -> we found even crazier, angrier lunatics to run for office and host talk shows -> repeat. I’m not sure how to break this. It’s profit driven, like so many of our problems that we can’t solve.
Meanwhile, there are literally well funded, well organized conservative conspiracies to take over the world. NOTHING like that exists on the left. I wish it did. I wish we had an alliance of monied interests on the left who were like “We need to fight these assholes!”
They were planning to invade Iraq way before 9/11 actually. When bush told the Saudis and even Tony Blair that Iraq was behind this (were talking September 12th) they were super perplexed.
Memos came out in early 2000s showing that post-saddam Iraq was already planned for.
Yeah, I remember watching a documentary video that showed alot of the discussions that were happening in the administration right on and after 9/11. Iraq was brought up pretty quickly, within 24 hours of the Towers coming down. It was pretty clear that while the rest of the world saw a huge tragedy, the Bush Administration saw a huge opportunity.
his followers are still just as dumb and malicious and they’ve infested every nook and cranny of the government like maggots.
Wow mate, let’s not go so far… Maggots are at least good in some situations, as they can remove rotten flesh and speed up recovery, saving people’s limbs and sometimes lives under the right circumstances. If anything, I would say we need maggots in there, to get rid of the rotten ones.
Depends on the metric. Direct threat to democracy, increasing violence and dangerr for millions of Americans, harming economic futures for Americans, etc.: probably Trump.
Sheer body count: maybe Bush, but don’t forget about all the people who would still be alive or more healthy if Trump had not actively sabotaged COVID response.
Okay I’m back to Trump.
I think Dubya hands down if we’re reducing to the presidency. To me Trump represents the absurd spectacle American politics has become, but the worst thing about Trump winning was that the Republicans were able to pass legislation. Trump as an individual wasn’t very successful as a politician once he was in power. Trump, Hillary, and Biden are so widely unpopular in general, and Trump barely losing to someone like Biden after one term really drives the point home how meaningless so much of these politics are right now apart from the spectacle they provide. Trump was the spectacle in a pure form, and when the mainstream liberal media was covering him as a frontrunner in early 2016 and reacting to every tweet, that was my first realization this presidency could potentially happen.
Bush and the post-9/11 world I view as the sort of last doubling-down towards the political situation we live in today, and Obama represented the best we can hope for within this system. While Obama was insanely likable as a personality and speaker I never really supported the politics he stood for. Adolph Reed Jr. had the best take on Obama in 1996, now an infamous article since it was really validated post-Obama:
“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”
The decrepit political landscape today is a perfect fit for Trump but I don’t think he controls it, he’s just a mirror that reflects back on itself, it’s what goes on in his shadow that’s the real danger. I think progressives being so enraptured by Trump’s terribleness is another serious issue because of this. Just being “not Trump” has allowed the Democrats to be lax on anything that would upset their donor base. Biden was always a darling of the Israel lobby for instance (why Obama picked him as VP) and we’re seeing the effects of this right now. Bernie was a real mobilization and hope for the left and the attacks about him being soft on race etc from liberal progressives was basically an indication of where the Democrat party is. They want the “do-good” version of the same economic system the Republican’s want to hand to the barons, and there’s no political alternative to this system being offered, just the form it takes. Now there’s hope in the increasing labor actions and strikes, an encouraging trend as people are pushed further and further being offered nothing by mainstream politicians.
George W Bush certainly caused more deaths, was just as decisive and is the reason Trump was allowed to happen. OK, so he’s got a bit more of a charming personality and gives Michelle Obama candy sometimes, but that doesn’t absolve him. Doesn’t absolve Trump either, he’s a loud mouthed buffoon who tried to start a Civil War. He has followers who will literally do anything he tells them to do. The idea of him having a second term absolutely terrifies me.
Also… No other POTUS has fucked up so many diplomatic relations as Trump did.
When George W Bush did it you at least knew it was part of a planned strategy…
George W Bush certainly caused more deaths
That’s debatable. Trump’s handling of the pandemic was atrocious. >1 million Americans dead under his watch. Worse than any other 1st world nation.
The interesting thing about how this question plays out in my mind is that it seems obvious Trump is worse, but I feel more annoyed and offended about Bush than Trump, and I think, given I’m not even American, part of why that is, is that a similar feeling lingers with respect to the Australian Prime Minister during Bush’s term. A man for whom I feel special kind of hatred, John Howard.
I really fucking hate John Howard despite some of the conservatives that came after him being arguably dumber and more embarrassing and making even crazier decisions. I don’t think we ever had our Trump moment despite some spectacularly shit tier leaders since, but nevertheless they were their own special kind of ridiculous. It’s a toss up who our closest equivalent is but I’d say probably Tony Abbott followed closely by one of his successors, Scott Morrison.
Where I’m going with this, and how it relates to Bush v. Trump, is that in their case and in the Australian context, it feels like they’re responsible if so much of the bad stuff that’s gone on since. It’s Prime Minister John Howard’s fault that we later got Tony Abbot and after him Scott Morrison, and it’s John Howard’s fault that we got mixed up in Iraq for no godamn reason, and John Howard’s fault that perverse cruelty came to be regarded as political courage and strength and also the only viable path towards electoral success.
The thing with Howard, as with Bush, is that they feel to me like they represent the people we got, right at the crossroads point in time when it was still possible to pull back from where we’ve ended up, and they both failed utterly, seemingly instead to hit the accelerator. At a certain stage when you hear about Donald Trump doing something stupid or asinine or brazenly corrupt, I almost can’t summon the will to be mad at him personally. It’s now just par for the course and it would feel like getting angry with a chimpanzee for throwing faeces at the wall instead of making sound policy decisions. Yes it’s galling that the decisions are so poor and irrational, but at the same time, it’s a chimpanzee that somehow got to hold political office so honestly, what did we expect?
I’m not sure exactly when the shift occurred but it feels like somewhere post-Bush and post Howard, we stopped having politicians who, while we won’t always agree with, we can assume are acting in what they at least think are everyone’s best interests (even if we believe them to be wrong). Instead we moved to no longer even having real candidates with actual goals, just personified contempt and rampant self interest. It’s like frail, fallable and flawed human beings, for all their faults, got replaced instead with joke cartoon characters, so it’s tough to keep holding them to the same standard because they’re not even real candidates just cruel jokes.
This feeling kind of makes me so much angrier with Bush and Howard that they were the last people that could have done something and instead they just let this happen because at least they got to win. The lasting effects both in terms of policy impact and just the overall cultural landscape that they have wrought upon the world are the seeds of every psychopathic lunatic that has since followed them. Tony Abbott, and Donald Trump were basically grown from seeds sown in the nursery of fucked up self interest that those assholes cultivated.
For the US, Trump tried to destoy democracy so that’s hard to top. And if he gets elected again, he will certainly succeed. For the rest of the world, both are clowns with nuclear weapons so equally dangerous. Trump just didnt had enough time to make as much damage, but what Trump did that Bush didnt, is inspiring right-wingers around thw world, with is deinfornation tactics.
