Bush may actually have been a worse President than Trump, at least if measured by the impact of his policies on the planet as a whole. (Admittedly, he had twice as many years in office to screw things up.)
The Gulf War was a colossal, totally predictable logistical and moral disaster at multiple levels, a mess which led to massive loss of civilian life and contributed to the ongoing miseries of the Middle East. I can’t think of a worse policy decision by a President in my lifetime. (I was born as the Vietnam War ended, so if we went back far enough, entering that war might have been a worse decision.)
Trump’s handling of Covid was a huge mess, and did contribute to loss of life, but I don’t see how we wouldn’t have had major suffering under any Administration. He worsened a bad situation, but he didn’t actually create the situation.
That was probably Trump’s biggest policy disaster. Most of the rest of what he did was a mix of gross corruption and incompetence, with some truly awful and unnecessarily deficit-busting fiscal policy tossed in. That’s really, really bad, but probably not world-class in its disastrous impact.
Trump is a worse human being than Bush, in the sense that he’s throughly and unashamedly corrupt, sleazy, narcissistic, emotionally stunted, loudly bigoted, and pretty much embodies every gross quality one could imagine. I have an extremely low opinion of Bush, but I think it’s unlikely he would sexually assault my niece if they were alone in a room together, which is not something I could say about Trump.
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