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‘Morally indefensible’ – but George W Bush will not come out against Trump
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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.
Both were awful. At least you don't fall for the rehabilitation so many in our media have been doing of Bush
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.
But look, he paints! Just like Bob Ross, so that means we can just forget about all that other stuff, right?
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.
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.'
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.
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.