While Dick Cheney has endorsed Harris, there have been no comments from other senior Republicans from Bush’s era
The MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell this week hit out at George W Bush, the Republican former president, for refusing to weigh in on America’s looming presidential election.
“All any decent person wants him to do is to say, ‘Don’t vote for Donald Trump, and here’s why,’ and he won’t even do that,” O’Donnell told the Fast Politics podcast, of the Republican president who was in office from 2001 to 2009.
Increasingly, Bush – and some other top Republicans from his political era – are looking lonely in their ongoing refusal to take a side in an election in which many have warned that US democracy is under threat from Trump’s open sympathies with autocracy.
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I mean, Bush and Trump are in direct competition for worst presidents in living memory.
…and they both kinda jimmy with elections. They have a lot in common really so it makes sense he’ll be averse to calling out someone whose not that dissimilar to himself.
Also Bush has a generational bonding to the GOP, so there’s probably some level of moral compromise in that.
Depends on what “recent” memory is for you. I’ve got Reagan and Trump neck-and-neck. While Bush should be tried for war crimes, he’s nowhere close to as bad as Trump. I’d put Bush and Clinton in the cage match.
Reagan was well liked and won by a landslide, I hate to say. By the time Bush Jr came around the mask was coming off. Both Jr (-0.51%) and Trump (-2.09%) lost the popular vote when they were elected. Hindsight being what it is, Reagan bad, Bush bad, Bush Jr bad, and Trump bad.
America is a fascist country and it was particularly fascist during his '84 election bid. Winning in a landslide on a white supremacist, anti-LGBT, New Red Scare platform is not a point in his favor. Might as well laud the administrations of Andrew Jackson or William McKinley.
Given the degree of electoral suppression common to the post 14th Amendment American electoral system, those numbers are likely much worse. But they’re also illustrative of the consequences of electoral strategy. Republicans don’t care how much you run up the score in California if they can win on the margins in Pennsylvania or Michigan. Democrats keep reaching for Texas and Florida, then falling short, which bumps up their gross total without yielding any electoral benefit.
But neither party seems enthusiastic about ending the EC. Despite a Trump delegate coup in Georgia and a J6 riot at the capital threatening the legal transfer of power, Dems seem blaise about amending the constitution or even tilting the deck back in their favor with DC statehood.
Being popular does not make you a good president.
Of course he won the vote… otherwise he wouldn’t be president. It’s what he did when he was there that mattered. And boy. Did he fuck everything up good. Still is fucked up. Hell. He is probably the reason trump exists basically.
Right, in hindsight, as far as actual policy and actions taken as president, Reagan is the worst in modern times. We wouldn’t have Bush or Trump or Project 2025 without Reagan.
If you were to remove everything around 9/11 and Iraq from Bush’s presidency, he’s relatively okay as both president and person. He, arguably, did great things to help immigrants and minorities and children. Not sure how No Child Left Behind is seen these days. I think Bush did more to help the disadvantaged than Clinton. But, to really assess each and every action a president takes would require a college semester. And your perspective on good or bad may be influenced by what you believe the job of government is. Reagan’s entire pitch and lasting legacy as a Republican icon was to dismantle the federal government, eliminate “social” programs, put “bad people” in jail, promote corporatocracy, fool the middle class to believe in the trickle down effect. Not to mention the entire Iran Contra ordeal. I mean, we don’t have super solid evidence about Trump’s associations with foreign countries / leaders. Trump’s probably too stupid and narcissistic to care about anything other than opening Trump buildings and golf courses in other countries.
Trump’s worst actions as president were his judicial appointments. He’s easily the worst person to hold the office as president in all of US history, but as far as worst president in modern times, I think Regan has it over on him.
It’s actually a tough judgement call I would say. You’re right about everything, but you shouldn’t underestimate the damage Trumpism has done (and is doing) to the American people and politics. Trump has managed to radicalise millions of people and as Germany will attest after the fall of Nazism, de-brainwashing cultists is a herculean task that will often fail - many Germans carried their indoctrinated beliefs with them until that whole generation died off.
Reagan still might be worse on balance, but it’s probably close.
is different than Trump the president.
The presidential actions taken by President Reagan are different than the choices Americans are making to endorse and follow Trump. It’s the actions Reagan took as president that have in large part brainwashed the public and created the environment where people are flocking towards people like Trump.
Trump the president is a symptom of the problems created by Reagan, Stone, Cheney, and the Heritage Foundation. Trump the brand is the epitome of Reaganomics and corporatocracy.
Reagan set the seeds for dismantling our trust in government and putting it into corporations and celebrities. Reagan (the actor?!) is the prime modern-time example of the people ignoring politics in favor of celebrity.
I would argue that Reagan’s influence and GOP brainwashing far surpasses Trump’s to the point that the vast majority of people in this country are wholly unaware of its existence. Though, yes, the extremism that Trumpism has fostered is certainly more dangerous to the public and democracy. I just don’t blame Trump for all of it. America chose to elect him president for a reason. I believe that has more to do with Reagan than with Trump.
Great points! The idea that Trump is a symptom, a logical function of a longer and deeper process is something I absolutely agree with and I think needs to be spoken of more. I guess my follow-up question would be, is Reagan really the seed or is he too perhaps an almost inevitable product of the American culture?
I had Bush ahead of Trump for a long time, but now I have to give it to Donnie.
It’s one thing to lie about a war, and a whole differnet level to plan to kill citizens with Covid.
Presidents in the rear view mirror rarely carry the emotional weight of ones at the forefront.
I’d argue Reagan was worse than both of them. We had all the nightmarish bellicose foreign policy of the Bush Administration, the disastrous neglect of health care leading to multiple epidemics from the Trump Era, and dogshit fiscal policy that gave us massive recessions and enormous new debts to accompany our contracting quality of life at the end of his last term.
But who still remembers Iran-Contra or the '87 bank collapse or our deplorable environmental and civil rights policies or the then-extremely-lethal AIDS epidemic?
Buchanan and Andrew Johnson are still largely considered the two worst historical presidents. Truman and Nixon are routinely cited as 20th century flops. But its very difficult to remember how shit America was before most of the folks doing the rankings were even alive. Harder still to have enough of a historical baseline to make an objective measure.
As soon as Trump is done, we’re going to be on one about how DeSantis or Cruz or Matt Gaetz is the actual worst person to run for President in our lifetimes.
Over a million dead from Covid is the convincer for me.
I don’t think Jackson killed a million Natives and none of those actually voted for him, like Herman Cain voted for Trump
AIDS took 700,000. And it would have been far easier to contain than COVID-19, given the method of spread. But Reagan was on mic laughing at a journalist who asked about efforts by the CDC to contain the spread.
Trump’s COVID policy - at the start of the pandemic - wasn’t the worst. Maybe that’s because he saw it as an excuse to foist xenophobia on the country yet again. Maybe his germ-o-phobia played in our favor. But he did kick off a quarantine and direct a bunch of federal resources towards vaccine development. I’m not sure what Hilary would have done that was significantly better.
It was the GOP fundie base that went full anti-vax and tried to drag Trump along for the ride. And it was the GOP business base that demanded early reopening (a policy Dems in big blue states like NY and CA were also happy to embrace).
Our COVID fuck-ups were disappointingly bipartisan, even if the Trumpies ended up embracing the worst aspects of anti-vax rhetoric later on.
In addition to what the other response said about the Obama pandemic team, Trump also let his son-in-law try to weaponize the COVID response against democratic states/cities and steal PPE to sell to the highest bidder.
Trump intentionally delayed reacting to the Pandemic from the very start, after having shortsightedly firing response teams, ditching well-functioning policies, and selling off medical supplies. This was literally for political reasons. And then he did everything in his power to slow it down once it became a real emergency. He should be in the Hague for that alone. At no point was his response ever Ok.
You’re wrong. One thing you’re leaving out is that if trump simply had publicly supported mask use, many thousands of lives would’ve been undoubtedly saved. Instead of doing that he just parroted fox News lies about masks. Among other Republican specific fuckups.
Trump fired the head of the White House epidemic office because that guy was friends with another guy Trump didn’t like.
The Obama White House had a table top demonstration to show the incoming team how to deal with a pandemic. Trump declined to attend.
Covid was 100% Trump; he even called Dem warnings a ‘hoax.’
Both were awful. At least you don’t fall for the rehabilitation so many in our media have been doing of Bush
But look, he paints! Just like Bob Ross, so that means we can just forget about all that other stuff, right?
Both are incredibly incompetent. However, I think if Bush had not become president he would have been seen as somebody who is a bit stupid, and easy to influence, but otherwise a pleasant personality. Trump on the other hand was a criminal long before he saw the Oval Office.
Bush was terrible, for sure. But it was at least believable that he was doing what he thought was best for the country (Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld, not so much). But there is no way you’ll ever convince me that Trump cares about anyone or anything other than himself.