Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Which President Has Done More Harm and Damage to America, George W. Bush or Donald Trump?

May 4th 2020

President George W. Bush Addresses Joint Session of Congress (U.S National Archives)

By Thom Hartmann

With a new NPR documentary about George W. Bush and a recent video clip from the former president calling for national unity, it appears there’s a full-court press on to try to clean up his legacy.

Yet George W. Bush lied us into two wars that killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis, over 15,000 American soldiers and contractors, and inflamed the Middle East, leading to over 10 million refugees and a hellish existence for those in the region. Bush left over 52,000 Americans with shattered bodies, and an epidemic of suicide that continues to this day.

And Bush had been planning the Iraq war for a while. In 1999, he told Mickey Herskowitz, the guy his family hired to ghost-write his autobiography, A Charge To Keep, “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade...if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

Donald Trump, however, ignored intelligence as far back as November about the virus out of China, continued to ignore the intelligence throughout January and February while he refused to order the production of test kits, masks, or personal protective equipment for our front-line healthcare workers. He spent March golfing and going to rallies, and now we learn from The Washington Post that he spent the entire month of April trying to figure out how to crank up protests and re-open the economy so that it would be humming by November for his reelection.

Now we’re on track to a minimum 100,000 dead Americans by the end of the year as a result of Trump’s lies and incompetence. And he appears to have done as much damage to America’s reputation through his hatred, racism, and xenophobia as George W. Bush did with torture, extrajudicial murder, and the PATRIOT Act.

Which raises the question: Who is worse, Bush or Trump? And why?

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.