Michael Tae Sweeney: The thing with "was Bush or Trump worse" is I feel like, we were at like a 7 out 10 in governmental quality when Bush came in, a 2 when he left, then Obama pulled us back up to like 4 out of 10 then when Trump came in he crashed us instantly down to 1.

The thing with "was Bush or Trump worse" is I feel like, we were at like a 7 out 10 in governmental quality when Bush came in, a 2 when he left, then Obama pulled us back up to like 4 out of 10 then when Trump came in he crashed us instantly down to 1.

So like the experience of Trumpism was in a strict sense even worse than Bush, but Bush represented a more distressing and dramatic decline from what we should've expected from the people running the country.

I think I could actually make an argument that both Bush terms individually were worse than Trump's term, but it's close. First term had reaction to 9/11 and Iraq, second term had Katrina, Alito and Roberts and the worst economic meltdown in my lifetime. bsky.app/profile/rick...

bush was worse entirely because trump only had one term and is lazy and stupid, and even with that he still gave bush a run

I was gonna say it's a tragedy/farce thing but tbh W was pretty farce like too. It's the same joke over and over again with Reagan then W. then Trump bsky.app/profile/stri...

One thing I harp on a lot is that on the most part, Trump’s misdeeds were different from W’s in degree and brazenness, not type.

More to the point, the fact that nobody from W’s admin was prosecuted for lying us into the Iraq War is a huge part of how we got Trump in the first place

People will point to Eisenhower as an example of when the Republican Party was sane & reasonable, not realizing that Eisenhower was recruited from the sidelines by the moderate faction specifically to head off the party's Hooverite right wing. Once he left, the right wing took over.

im actually sort of nixon-sympathetic but i'll admit it's mostly contrarianism and the fact he I are January 9 birthday bros

And even then some horrible things happened during his administration like deporting people to mexico, including citizens whose families had been her from before california was a state. I mean, I liked the Eisenhower admin tax rates, but so much of the infrastructure was for cars and not transit…

Plus just the simple fact that you've gotta go back three-quarters of a century to grab an example

Ike. Operation wetback, racist highways, a Missouri style compromise on forcibly Americanizing Hungarian refugees. That qualifies as sane and reasonable?

The biggest reason, to me, is the extremely slow recovery of lost jobs and wealth under Obama. His response to the housing collapse was far too little, and did almost nothing for ordinary homeowners. He saved banks but let millions lose their homes.

Not just not prosecuted but completely welcomed in almost any context

At its core, as bad as Bush II was, going after him and his administration would have been incredibly unpopular and difficult. Obama was very much running on a "turn the page" agenda, so there was a lot of good if shortsighted reasoning behind letting them personally go.

We're dealing with the fallout from that decision today where the previous president now argues total immunity and the weaponization of the criminal process simply because there's less reluctance to go after his flagrant criminal behavior.

Thanks Obama

I didn't know about this, but Pelosi actually tried to defend not going after Bush II www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8RX...

Pelosi Admits She KNEW Bush Was Lying About Iraqwww.youtube.com Nancy Pelosi thinks all George W. Bush's lies were just 'misrepresentations'. Sam Seder and the Majority Report crew discuss this. We need your help to keep providing free videos! Support the Majority Report's video content by going to http://www.Patreon.com/MajorityReport Watch the Majority Report live M–F at 12 p.m. EST at youtube.com/samseder or listen via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM Download our FREE app: http://majorityapp.com SUPPORT the show by becoming a member: http://jointhemajorityreport.com LIKE us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/MajorityReport FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MajorityFM SUBSCRIBE to us on YouTube: http://youtube.com/SamSeder

Every republican administration enables the next one. Trump was able to set everything on fire because W spent years expanding the scope of the presidency and eroding public accountability, which was enabled by Reagan's normalization of conspiratorial scandal, enabled by Nixon, and on and on and on

I don’t even see how the two are comparable. Trump’s most damaging legacy isn’t even the actual policies he implemented (though those are bad), but rather the fact that he legitimized absolutely deranged behavior as politically viable. If W was diabetes, Trump is pancreatic cancer.

First as tragedy, then as farce, then as farce again but like one of the really bad Scary Movies level farce

tragedy (nixon), farce but kind of a sharply satirical one (reagan), farce but its like a scary movie style parody (W), farce but it's one of those over-the-top-gory horror movies like TERRIFIER (Trump)

Re: Trump tragedy/farce, that quote is about Napoleon III and his coup being the farcical imitation of his uncle’s 18 Brumaire coup, named for its date on the French revolutionary calendar. Converted from Gregorian dates, Election Day 2016 was on 18 Brumaire.

The big change is a lot more people noticed the farce. Reagan left office generally liked. His approval rating at the end was only 5 points lower than right after he was almost assassinated. Bush was so disliked a non-white man was elected, Trump didn't even get re-elected.

I was rewatching episodes of 30 Rock recently and the series of episodes where Jack works for the Bush administration - other than assertions that there was no recession - could easily be dropped in for Trump. It was striking.

no doubt a second trump term could be much much worse and obviously J6 a bit of a unique event but otherwise bush was so much worse

My take used to be that until COVID, Bush was worst; COVID pushed trump above him Seeing Biden's approach, at least in the early days, has me questioning that analysis

do people think W would've handled Covid well?

I think the argument for W doing a better job is mostly an observation that anti-vax was still a pretty fringe viewpoint in 2000-08 and he wouldn’t have seen any advantage to indulging it. And fair enough. The argument against is, of course, Katrina. Heck of a job, Brownie.

After 2005, yes. abcnews.go.com/Politics/geo...

George W. Bush in 2005: 'If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare'abcnews.go.com In the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush was on vacation when he began flipping through an advanced copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic.

Yes, because letting people die of a virus had not yet become a partisan issue. It was just a basic function.

We don’t need to speculate do we? I feel like he did okay when SARS hit. He certainly wasn’t in denial about it as I recall

COVID level yellow means you can attend football games. COVID level orange means you can attend football games but if you go to the DMV, you’re going to be asked to lick a lab rat and see if it sneezes.

"Heckuva job, Brownie"

His possibly only successful policy was PEPFAR, so there was some sort of public health competence in the room. Not emergency preparedness, though!

honestly some fucked up shit happened with trump and covid but congress managed to get the money out the door and warp speed made a vaccine and taken all together...not so bad!

It pains me to say that the Dem trifecta’s response to the GFC was far worse than the Pelosi/Mnuchin response to Covid

george w bush was a truly catastrophic president and through 2019 i was convinced he was a worse president than trump mostly because trump had managed to avoid experiencing any major historical events. but then covid came along and J6 too and trump became unequivocally much worse than bush

I think what the government did under Bush is very much worse than what the government did under Trump. Trump's damage is probably greater in contexts where it's more abstract, the national character and sense of itself.

I disagree primarily because his worst policies had the support of the Dems. And he did actually attempt comprehensive immigration reform, which would almost put him to the left of Biden today on that score - especially compared to the new border bill.

Competent evil is worse than cartoonish poorly done evil. Also wild to say that about Dubya but here we are

I served in Iraq three times, competent is not the word I would use to describe the Bush Administration

Oh. Oh god. Is Cheney still alive? Could he veep for Trump?

Given his daughter's work against Trump, it seems highly unlikely (on either's part) that Trump would have (any) Cheney as his VP.

By comparison, the Bush Admin was more competent than Trump. As bad as it was, Bush's Katrina response was more competent than Trump's COVID response; likewise the Bush Admin's lies prior to the Iraq invasion were more competent in achieving their goals than Trump's lies in service of stealing 2020.

he wasn't competent, but the murderous ghouls around him were (Rumsfeld, Bolton, etc)

The Republican response to positive government is to make it worse. The single thing Trump learned is that he wants to make government work better to punish people.

is the competent evil in the room with us right now

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