Just watched the Boy Boy video on George Bush’s Masterclass, and they made me think about which U.S. President was actually worse.
One attacked an innocent nation, the other attacked their own people.
This question is probably worth revisiting after 2024’s election, since Trump may still have more mileage. A second term might be more dangerous than the first was. Assuming he doesn’t win, then his legacy will mostly be all of the weird and slightly hard to measure changes to American culture, specifically conservative political culture.
He generally seems to have made more dangerous ideas popular but also to have made getting a governing coalition together to actually enact those ideas more difficult by eroding the Republican party. Bush’s foreign policy decisions seem to have been far more dangerous so I think I’d vote for Bush being the worst as of right now.
That said, Trump still has a non-zero chance of bringing real American fascism into power so that would change things.
I assumed he wouldn’t get in the first time. I really hope people don’t make that mistake in 2024. Voter turnout should be through the roof - because if there’s one thing the republicans hate more than the Democrats, it’s a high turnout.
Bush may have started devastating wars that lasted for decades, but I blame Trump for the war in Ukraine. There have been no worse war since WWII. And it may have been prevented if Ukraine would’ve received the military assistance during his Presidency they were asking for before Russia invaded.
Ukraine. There have been no worse war since WWII.
17,000 civilian deaths in Ukraine vs 280,000 in Iraq. What is your definition of “worse”?
Russia invaded in 2014
deleted by creator
Great answer.
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.
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.
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!”
deleted by creator
This is a tough question, because trump did lead an attempted coups to overturn democracy, but I’d say Bush W. The forever wars cost so many lives, far more than were killed as a direct result of trump’s actions. While trump’s failure to lead during Covid cost many lives as well, I think the net death toll is still considerably lower compared to Iraq/Afghanistan. And all for oil at that, also not known to be amenable to healthy living.
Good thing Trump’s coup agaisnt Venezuela failed
lol, oops, forgot about that one. It was truly a clown show of epic proportions. But to be clear I’m referring to Jan 6.
Yeah, just pointing out that it wasn’t Trump’s first time trying that. Just his first attempt of 2021
Having lived through both presidencies I’d say people thought Bush jr was as dumb a president you could get until trump came along and said hold my beer and made an absoloute farce out of politics
Bushisms were way funnier than Trumpisms IMO. Although that doesn’t blind me to how bad both were.
Bush was an absolute monster, but Trump literally broke brains. America will never be the same.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
deleted by creator
Covid killed a lot of people - millions of them. It’s not a war, but Trump’s management of covid resulted in a lot of unnecessary deaths.
When talking about who was worse we can’t just look at the atrocities. But for America specifically Trump is worse. Bush was just another crooked politician fueling the war machine. Trump tried to take over after he lost. Technically bush did his job, Trump tried to burn the store down for not renewing a contract.
Iraq was a war that Bush had to sell, but Americans were out for blood after 9/11 and the Taliban was hosting the group that planned the attack at that time. The international community agreed that 9/11 was effectively an act of war and didn’t really complain about the invasion of Afghanistan.
The Bush administration fucked up the war and occupation of Afghanistan, but the only way to stop that way would be to stop 9/11.
I mean the Taliban literally offered up Bin Laden but Bush rejected the offer and instead chose to invade. 20 years later and hundreds of thousands there’s nothing to show for it. It’s not like there weren’t people critical of the invasion at the time.
The Taliban didn’t. They offered to give bin Laden to another Islamic nation to give to the USA. Even if you were to look at 9/11 as a crime instead of an act of war, the Taliban weren’t interacting with established norms of handing over suspects of a crime across international borders.
And some people were critical of the invasion at the time, but no decision is going to be unanimous across an entire nation. Also, a lot of the criticism wasn’t really based on the Taliban being in the right, but more in regards of dealing with the country after deposing the only political group capable of some type of national organization.
They offered him up to be tried in a third country and were open to negotiating. That’s still offering him up. The invasion just ensured that the Taliban and even Al Queda had plenty of new recruits. Bin Laden also remained at large for almost another decade. I’d consider it an abject failure if it wasn’t clear that the Bush administration didn’t really give a damn about their stated objectives.
Instead they just wanted to extend the US’s military influence into Central Asia and make a quick buck of military contracts in the process.
The Taliban were negotiating on behalf of some who launched such a large attack that it could have been considered to be an act of war, and even then were proposing methods that would allow bin Laden to escape and were outside international norms for handling criminals.
And the attempted capture of bin Laden was a failure, but we are looking back on what happened. The actual successful capture of bin Laden involved the breaching of sovereignty of a nuclear power to attack him in a night operation. Pakistan wasn’t even given the option to negotiate.
This is too fatalistic for my tastes
If 9/11 happened to any other major country at the time, including Russia and China, I doubt the outcome would have been something less than a war. Maybe the war might not have a stated goal of toppling the Taliban outright, but there would have been military action in Afghanistan to address al-Qaeda.
Afghanistan was UN sanctioned, Iraq was the one that was not.
Now let’s think about how many people would have died if Trump succeeded. Worldwide even as more right wing mobs tried to overthrow their countries and Putin would run even more unchecked.
deleted by creator
Bush was much worse in effect, because his administration was much more competent. Our most recent former President was a worse person and an awful President domestically, but was largely ineffective at actual bad governance.
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.
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.
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.
Bush was way worse, he only made me laugh like twice. Trump was rolling on the floor riot laughing, especially when he brought out his little accordion. What a legend.
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.
Both are absolute pieces of shit.
Bush was literally put in through a coup
