Previous presidents have been threats to humanity due to their wars, and to various sectors of the nation due to their policies. Both voluntary presidential wars and other negative policies of a great many presidents have done far more damage in human lives and suffering than Trump has so far. George Washington for example did way more damage to Native Americans than Trump has done to immigrants, horrible and evil as Trump’s DHS and ICE may be, and many 19th century Presidents were equally malicious and destructive. At least ICE doesn’t massacre civilians or deliberately infect populations with deadly diseases.
But where let us say GWB was a dire threat to Iraqis and did vast harm to innocent civilians there and elsewhere around the world, he was no threat to the American establishment, on either side of the aisle. Neither was Obama, nor Clinton, nor indeed any President since Lincoln.
Trump in comparison is inimical to all establishment elements of American society including paleo-conservatives. He can potentially destroy the republic, where other presidents merely perverted and corrupted it by degrees.
First of all, the question is whether HW and Trump are fundamentally different, not whether either deserves respect.
Secondly, American exceptionalism does not mean “might makes right”. It means America is uniquely capable of determining what is right because its history is uniquely linked to the cause of liberty. This is the case regardless of whether the enemies of liberty are mightier, as they were sometimes perceived (Nazi Germany, USSR). The idea is as old as de Tocqueville, who wrote at a time when America was not especially mighty at all.
You don’t have to agree with the sentiment to recognize that Trump doesn’t share it.
One led a world war that killed millions. The other may have assassinated a few dozen people and overturned democracy and wrote a crazy, delusional and racist book. Which is the most threatening really depends where on the “utilitarian” spectrum you are and where in time you sit.
Bush 2 led to an unjust war and hundreds of thousands of deaths, but still had the pretense of a casus belli and still believed in the international order. Trump, otoh, doesn’t believe in justice or order, and his very continued exists erodes democracy, but hasn’t yet gone over the top, while clearly being the worse person of the two.
If Hitler didn’t make to the end of 1936, would he have just been a blip on history, a corrupted and broken echo of the inhumanity of the past? If we get past Trump without a catastrophic breakdown, will he be the same?
Or are both just points along broader historic processes? Is Bush 2 just a reaction to Clinton, talk radio and the degradation of conservative journalism just a reaction to Whitewater, which is just an echo of the Southern Strategy, which is an attempt to grab the Solid South, which is a racist reaction to the defeat of the Confederacy in the US Civil War, which was caused because of the Great Compromise and the contorsions the South forced the rest of the country through to keep slavery legal, which ect. and ect.
I think that the potential for Trump to do damage to our political institutions and democracy is high, but it just hasn’t completely happened yet. His administration is one of pure chaos and incompetence, so incompetent that even holding all three branches of government in a conservative way, nothing of substance or permanence has been implemented. He got the rich a tax cut, and a lot else has been challenged by the courts. The issues with North Korea were really dumb and bad, but I don’t think we were ever beyond the idiotic posturing of two countries with mutually assured destruction.
With the democrats taking a clear majority of the House, I think the limits to the damage his administration can do are significantly weakened.
His sheer willingness to veer into authoritarianism is terrifying, but I honestly think (and hope) that this will be nothing more than a historically remembered test of the checks and balances in our system. This feels bad because it is happening now, and we are currently in the shit.
But this could all be, 5 years from now, a time where we laugh that the Apprentice guy was president for 4 years, and then arrested on felony charges and removed from office.
I can’t argue against the potential harm of this administration, but it is still only potential. The GWB administration did material and documented harm to millions of Iraqi and Afghan citizens, as well as the lives of the military personnel changed by serving in a war that was unjustified and predicated on lies.
That is not really how it looks to the rest of the world. It’s just how we justify throwing our weight around, and how our allies sometimes justify helping us do that. It still comes down to us largely doing what is in our own interest without regard to international law or norms, and occasionally having our interests match those of our allies.
This is instructive along those lines, arguing that the way in which Trump is different is that he proposes to act in the US’s interest without feeling any need to disguise it with higher rhetoric. The difference is the rhetoric, not the policy.
No, the reason your hate is irrational, is that you have apparently EQUAL levels of hate for Bush and Trump.
Your criticism of Bush is not irrational.
It’s your promotion of that criticism to the level where you say “I’d rather have Trump as President” that makes it irrational.
I mean, you guys are trying to make it seem that my position is some excuse for the current GOP… In a thread called “The decline to moral bankruptcy of the GOP” which I started.
Would Germany’s failure to grapple with the cultural forces that led to Hitler have made someone like him inevitable again?
You don’t need to convince me of the dangers of Trump. Trump is dangerous. But, I think it’s not an aberration that the GOP gave rise to Trump, and the cultural forces that the GOP represents will continue to erode democracy in American unless we grapple with them. Part of grappling with them involves acknowledging and understanding their long, sordid political history within that party. If we pretend Trump appeared out of thin air, we won’t know how to prevent it happening again. The media, especially, needs to stop reflexive bothsiderism; it needs to call out lies for what they are and frame them as lies; it needs to focus more on policy and less on demagoguery and political maneuvering; it needs more independence from politics. Our political system has apparent flaws; we need to examine how to shore up democratic principles without relying on unwritten norms. We need more transparency as a matter of course, and we need to enforce that transparency with laws. We need to shore up the system of checks and balances that’s supposed to hold everything together. We need to understand how the political incentives that gave rise to the GOP’s political strategy, which fundamentally corrupted both the party and its constituents to the point where white evangelicals will happily vote for the dude who brags about grabbing women by the pussy.
Some have, but there aren’t enough racists and authoritarians to account for the midterm elections. There are plenty of people who are still voting GOP and think they’re on the side of good. They wouldn’t be caught dead voting Dem after all those years of limbaugh and fox. They think dems are enemies of the country, not americans with different opinions about how to govern.
I do not have equal levels of hate for W and Trump. W is an ok guy, and I would in fact enjoy a beer with him. He did terrible things as president though - worse things than Trump has been allowed to do so far. Now that the Dems hold the house, I doubt trump will be able to do much more that is of permanent harm to the country. So trump will end up doing less damage, waking people the fuck up, and engaging them in a way W didn’t during his ransacking of the coffers and war profiteering. You may not agree with that, but it’s not irrational.
This would be true if I (and others) hadn’t given multiple rational reasons for it. If you disagree, that’s fine (though you haven’t bothered to give reasons for disagreeing), but I’m being pretty rational.
It’s beside the point though. My comment was merely a minor point in a discussion about the GOP and whether Trump is an aberration. I get the sense that you think I’m trying to normalize Trump. I’m not. I’m making a case for the GOP having always been insane (at least during my lifetime.) Trump is just another facet of that insanity.
The arguments here that Trump is basically no different from Bush are the same that I hear from Republicans who still support Trump. “What’s the big deal, the media make him look bad but ultimately he is doing the same things that Bush did”.
They’re wrong, but at least this thread helps me understand why that 30-40% won’t budge.
Seems like Yglesias has been reading our stupid argument and wants to join in.
Never-Trump neocons’ essential paradox is that for all Trump’s many sins, he (so far) hasn’t done anything even remotely as pernicious as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In its main phase from 2003 to 2011, this war led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, plus what appears to be around 400,000 Iraqis. And that was only the beginning. The regional destabilization the invasion touched off led directly to the rise of ISIS and a whole new round of fighting in Iraq in which many thousands of people have died.
It’s funny because someone recently made a tweet showing how Yglesias was an idiot, with a series of stories that he wrote at various points saying “Trump is better than other GOP folks” then “I was wrong” then “I was really wrong, Trump is terrifying” and now has gone back to his original position. I’ll see if I can find it.
I’m not sure that tweet shows what you think it shows. The third story doesn’t contradict the second, and the second is an explicit acknowledgement of a change of view from the first.
Yeah, it’s exactly the same argument… basically, if you are hyper partisan, then the partisanship overrides everything. Any republican is evaluated purely based on his status as a republican, rather than any individual qualities.
Bush saved millions of people in Africa through his efforts to combat AIDS… but still, that’s basically the same as Trump, right? Because Trump would totally do that. Right?
So then the response will inevitably be, “Well maybe he did that, but he did bad thing X!”
What’s the absolutely best thing Trump did thus far? Has he done anything that could be considered good? Literally anything?
People are not saying that trump and W are the same.
They are very different in the ways the enacted their policies, and luckily for the USA and the world, trump has been pretty bad at it.
Trump is a mob boss. W was a skilled GOP politician. Trump came from the policies, platform, and propaganda that the GOP enacted to stay in power over the last 20 years.
W did more actual damage than trump has so far. Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the country, democracy, political norms, or anything but money and popularity. He is more likely to actually try to deconstruct our country than W, but he hasn’t been allowed to, and likely won’t.
None of that is saying that trump and W are essentially the same.
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
He was surrounded by skilled GOP politicians, and let them do their work. He was not particularly skilled at anything, other than maybe amateur painting?
I mostly agree with what you wrote. Trump is uniquely bad, but his effectiveness is reduced by a Congress that is only interested in the usual kind of bad.
However, I am responding to the same people as Timex.
He became president on a platform of good old boy charm. That’s the skilled politician part. He allowed skilled policy makers to run the show for him. I didn’t claim he was skilled at policy.
