I am not aware of anything really serious in Germany like with Trump in the US. What I alluded to was that in the US you only have the choice between bad and very bad in terms of parties. There are certain terrible things that nobody seems to be able to influence anymore like the problems with three-letter-agencies or gun control.
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.
I think their administrations likely had equally bad intentions. The incompetence of Trump’s administration just means they acted more erratically. They were also much worse at getting press on their side and worse at covering up their actions.
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.
The electoral college stole them both an election, neither of them actually won their first term popular votes. With Bush it was just more screwed up because of it all coming down to a handful of votes in FL and however many recounts with the court eventually calling it quits. One of the few times where the popular and electoral votes didn’t agree but 2 withing 4 presidential terms isn’t a good sign. At some point we need to get rid of that arcane getup. Land doesn’t vote but those guaranteed 2 electors that every state gets ends up with places out in the middle of nowhere getting more votes per capita than actual population centers.
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.
And we still have no idea how many people from the second and third world have had access to all of the top secret documents kept at Mar-A-Lago.
It may take a team of forensic investigators a decade to uncover how many American lives have been and might still be being lost directly because of his actions.
I think Trump did worse things than Bush did, but Trump's rise to power would have never happened without the actions of Bush Junior and Bush senior and Reagan, so for me it's kind of hard to say who did worse.
I think it’s more a reflection of the media people consume. It’s easy for people to forget Bush’s war crimes when he’s been rehabilitated in part to make Trump look like an exceptional threat.
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.
How can what Trump did be worse than killing a million civillians, running torture camps, invading foreign nations, commitingto extrajudicial killings, and giving rise to the IS, who again killed hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed millenia of human history and culture and commited all imagineable atrocities?
Because Trump would normalize invading countries, running camps (he already kept kids in cages!), trying to get the government to commit extrajudicial killings, and idolizing tyrants like Putin, Orban, Kim, etc.,
This isn’t hyperbole, there’s examples plenty of each.
Bush did all of this 20 years ago. To be fair though invading other countries, putting fascist regimes into power there, extrajudicial killings and camps all have been part an integral part of american history. It became a new quality with Bush though as the world progressed to a more humane standard at the time and the veil put around these things by Bush was much thinner, than by his predecessors.
Still Trump is ultimately just continueing the work of Bush. It is just more noticeable as he is very loud and brazen about it, where Bush was only outspoken about it.
thanks for your stellar analysis, it’s factually incorrect and bereft of insight nuance or critical thought. keep trying to tie them together, it’s pointless but obviously keeps you very entertained.
Others have said that it depends on exactly what your standards are for defining “worse”. Broadly speaking, it seems to come down to whether you’re emphasizing foreign or domestic policy. It’s not necessarily because people don’t understand or are downplaying atrocities.
The question is vague enough that it’s entirely possible for informed, compassionate people to come to different conclusions. That’s why this is an interesting discussion.
Bush did a hell of a lot more harm with his war on terror and basically lying about why we wanted to go to war , but Trump single-handedly paved a very dangerous road for the US to become fascist and have crony capitalism (or at least, make it much more apparent and much worse).
Dubya was an asshole politician who wasted thousands upon thousands of lives for oil - and I would still say he’s less bad than Trump because Trump wanted to make the US into something more akin to China and Russia.
Trump wanted to make the US into something more akin to China and Russia
Don’t act like US didn’t want it. Almost half the population voted for it, dum dum. War crimes causing millions of deaths are a little important than your binge internal politics.
With a military as big and armed as the US, you can absolutely argue that our binge internal politics are actually worth taking into account for these sort of things. The fact that seemingly half of the US population voted for it (whether they were actually for it, or were just voting not Democrat to “own the libs” is another conversation) is fucking terrifying.
The reason I would say that Trump is worse than Dubya is because of the potential and horrific shitshow that could happen if the US became more like Russia or China. To help put it into perspective, imagine if Putin was in charge of the US army. It’s not too crazy of a stretch to say that he would probably invade all of his small surrounding neighbors and absorb them as Russian territories or make them become part of Russia itself. Take this example a step further - he has access to the US arsenal of nukes. How long would it be until he would fire nukes at other nations and invade them?
That’s not to say Dubya is better - like I said, starting a 20-year war for oil but masking it behind “removing WMDs” and “God told me to do it”, wasting lives pointlessly for greed is fucking disgusting. But it would legitimately pale in comparison to the damage somebody like Trump being in charge of a fascist US can and would do to the world for years to come.
Blind unwavering nationalism is a cancer. The (North?) American Dream is one of individualism and corporate reliance. It’s slowly seeping north of our common border, too.
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.
Especially galling was "W" making a "funny" video where he pretended he was looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Quite the pos in retrospect.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Bush. He was the worst president within my lifetime and a war criminal beyond that of Trump’s wildest imaginations. If Bush were running agaisnt Trump I would support Trump
OMG my soul… If those were the choices for an election id either leave the country or leave the earth…with a bang… In their vicinity.
Bush 100% was worse though. Trump was too apathetic about doing actual governing in favor of stuffing his and his families pockets. Bush had a whole team dedicated to funneling tax dollars into the military industrial complex and got us into 2 wars to satiate the likes of Rumsfield and Cheney, the ramifications of said wars are still being felt today throughout the world. Fucking hanging chads…
I fear, though, that Trump v2 will have everything at his disposal that Bush had, and more. Heritage Foundation is already rigging the scaffolding for reintroducing Schedule F with the next GOP president, and have personnel lists.
Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.
Definitely Trump. Tried to subvert democracy, wholly unprofessional attitude as president (in my opinion the first president to not even attempt “rising to the office” at all), handled the economy with the tact of a middle schooler, and (allegedly) divulged / kept classified documents. He is also a civilly liable rapist. All of this I think makes Trump the third worst president of all time, behind James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce.
George Bush is easily the second worst president in modern history, his initial response to 9/11 was a highpoint, but afterwards he started a useless war and, although he incorrectly wouldn’t see it this way, bent at the knee to terrorism by subverting constitutional rights for the purposes of mass searches and seizures of information without a warrant or reasonable cause. (i.e. Patriot Act). It’s been a while since I hashed out a whole list, but I believe I had Bush somewhere between 7th and 12th worst or so.
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.
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.
Anyone who says trump was worse should not be taken seriously about politics, all they care about is feeling good about their country and being able to ignore politics. Bush killed half a million Iraqis in service of oil company quarterly earnings, it’s not even close.
I usually use half a million, as that’s the undisputed number. I agree though that it’s most likely a full million. Why would you believe anything trump says? And Trump’s response to COVID is not nearly as bad as what bush did in Iraq.
If Trump leads to the end of America and it’s sham democracy, he will be the greatest president the world has ever had. But liberals can’t stand to call America the bad guy.
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.
We joked about W and Cheney cancelling the election. “Bush 2008 - why should the law stop us now?”
The Idiot was responsible for a failed coup.
The part where an angry mob invaded the capital, held back by precious few law enforcement officials, with the entire federal elected government hiding in one location? That was the lesser part. That was the visible mushroom emerging from the mycellum organism that permeated his turd of an administration. In the year leading up to that violent assault on the American government, he’d openly suggested “delaying” the election, on account of the plague he also insisted was fake. He had the Postal Service destroy the literal machinery of democracy with the explicit intent of vilifying and preventing mail-in voting. He extorted a foreign ally in hopes of committing fraud, and just about ruined the State Department with his narcissistic tantrums about getting caught doing those crimes.
George W. Bush was an intolerable authoritarian moron who openly betrayed the ideals of the nation and his duties to its people. We spent seven years constantly terrorized by our own government’s vague-but-menacing warnings and gleeful overreactions to attacks they failed to detect.We still have people trapped in an offshore torture prison because of that motherfucker. He was the worst domestic threat the United States had faced since the Business Plot. There was no excuse for ever electing anyone so brazenly corrupt and dishonest ever again. And then The Idiot was worse. The Idiot was orders of magnitude worse, on every possible front, without one god-damn iota of ambiguity or disguise. Republicans nominated and installed an incompetent criminal fascist.
Public opinion was very much in favor of the war in Afghanistan after 9/11. Maybe not so much Iraq, but it’s hard to blame Bush squarely for those wars when they had bipartisan support.
Bush is done doing damage to our country, and might actually be considered a voice of reason compared to today’s Republicans.
It’s definitely already Trump, and he’s not even done doing damage yet.
Even if Republicans elect someone who is identical to Trump in his words, views, and actions, that person would still be better for the country than Trump. It’s critically important for the justice department to hold him accountable for the insurrection and trying to overthrow our democracy, or it WILL happen again.
Even if Republicans elect someone who is identical to Trump in his words, views, and actions, that person would still be better for the country than Trump.
You had me up to here, I disagree. Either case would be a disaster. If it walks like a Trump, and quacks like a Trump, it’s a Trump.
I didn’t have a problem going into Afghanistan. I had alarm bells going off in my head before going into Iraq but I didn’t say shit. that’s not going to happen again.
The “good war” is always an alarm bell for me, the real losers are always civilians, and what America did in Afghanistan and Iraq dwarfs what’s going on in Gaza now.
You should dig a little further into the run up to the Iraq war. If you like podcasts checkout the first season of “Blowback”. Pretty in depth history. Trump was awfull in other ways but the Bush administration has the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands.
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