Historical counterfactuals, while fun, aren’t actual historiography. There is no right answer. It’s silly to pretend you are right and any other interpretation is patently wrong.
I would argue Bush was far worse than Trump, if the measure is pure death count. If the measure is long term harm to democracy then Trump was far worse. If the view point is from North America, then Trump was far worse. If the viewpoint is from the Middle East, then Bush was far worse.
We also have the vantage of decades hindsight with Bush we don’t have with Trump so it’s hard to compare fairly. It’s possible Trump turns out worse in the end for all measures.
While Trump’s actual actions really aren’t all that different from most other recent presidents (if he’s a fascistic dictator, they are all fascistic dictators), the real thing he does differently that’s new and scary is use social media, cable news, etc. to present the specter of many worse things. Maybe that’s just as bad because of how it warps our society by allowing all the quiet parts to be said out loud.
This is the same president who literally called his invasion of muslim countries a crusade. So both sides at home, mask off imperialism abroad.
But yeah, ok trump would have made things less safe for muslims in the us. Hard to imagine anything less save than actual military invasion and years of anarchy Bush brought the middle east though.
Pompeo believes in the rapture. Trump would have loved a war. We’re just lucky it never transpired. I really object to the stupidity, naivete and other bad personality traits of Trump being used as positives for why he wasn’t as bad as possible. Its exactly why he was!
To go off of Champ, ~40% of Americans are now in an alternate reality cult. The media can’t be trusted. Qanon is real, Trump won the election. The media is the enemy of the people. Democrats are raping and eating babies. Covid is a hoax, masks don’t work. This is a real bad and bleak time! GOP officials believe this stuff!
He has way less respect for the law than the already pretty disrespectful previous president’s. Agree that it’s just a matter of how far he went vs being a different kind of thing.
I do think gross incompetence is a fash thing though.
As I pointed out earlier, it depends on what measure you mean unless your view is Bush was worse on every conceivable measure which just doesn’t seem supported by the evidence.
Lol nobody on this board hates W more than me. Many of you might hate him the same amount but I’m at the cap. His approach to government is a sizable amount of how we got here. He definitely wasn’t morally superior to Trump.
I don’t even think Trump is personally to blame for all of this. Other people could have stopped him and didn’t. He really doesn’t know better. Can’t say the same for Bush.
He would have done whatever his base wanted, and his base wanted to annihilated all Muslims. We probably would have had muslims in camps, and we absolutely would have attacked somebody. He wouldn’t have tried to calm the nation, he would have worked it into a fever of racist revenge.
I dunno maybe we get lucky and he only goes after Afghanistan, but I’m not sure his base would be happy with that.
When your number 1 argument against “he’s a fascist” is “um, actually, he’s too stupid and lacks the attention span to be a fascist” it’s not super convincing.
i mean you don’t have to be tedious and just check the wiki.
Although the Soviet Union declared itself anti-imperialist, critics argue that it exhibited traits common to historic empires.[104][105][106] Some scholars hold that the Soviet Union was a hybrid entity containing elements common to both multinational empires and nation states. Some also argued that the USSR practiced colonialism as did other imperial powers and was carrying on the old Russian tradition of expansion and control.[106]Mao Zedong once argued that the Soviet Union had itself become an imperialist powerwhile maintaining a socialist façade. Moreover, the ideas of imperialism were widely spread in action on the higher levels of government. Some Marxists within the Russian Empire and later the USSR, like Sultan Galiev and Vasyl Shakhrai, considered the Soviet regime a renewed version of the Russian imperialism and colonialism.[107]