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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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.
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.
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.