Who was worse, George W. Bush or Donald Trump?

Trump. He tried to overthrow our democracy.

I feel like while bush was a much worse president then most people realize, with some of his policies and things like the patriot act still in effect and gumming up the works, trump did more damage in erroding the facade of democracy and empowering fanatics

Speaking as a Canadian, the Bush presidency was certainly wince-inducing. I was genuinely surprised he got re-elected after that clusterfuck of a first term. By the end of the 2nd, I was fairly convinced the best days of America were behind it.

But the difference between him and Trump is the wounds were more self-inflicted on the country with Bush. Still not great for Canada, whose fortunes rise and fall on what happens on the other side of the border.

But Trump had a genuine animosity for freedom-loving, democracy-respecting American allies and a love for oppressive dictatorships. He tore up trade agreements, levelled tariffs, etc. against Canada and Europe while advancing diplomacy in person in the likes of North Korea.

And on a more social level, he poisoned public discourse and stoked right-wing authoritarianism all over the world. I have family members I can't talk to anymore. And the lunatic fringe came out of the woodwork under his term. We even had a mosque shooter here in Canada who was quite candid about Trump being his inspiration.

Within the US, Americans hate Americans with a passion. What a mess. Another civil war is not out of the question. As such, I am coming down on Trump being far, far worse.

Reagan. He set the conservative party and the USA on a dark path where Bush and Trump were the inevitable result.

I think Trump will have done the most damage when the dust settles. We've had almost 20 years to see the effects Bush had on our country but only about 3 years since Trump left office. He packed the Supreme Court, made people proud to be racists, destroyed our electoral system, gutted the EPA, sold our secrets to our enemies, and made fascism popular.

After Bush's presidency I thought "Phew, glad that's over. I bet that's the worst president I'll experience in my lifetime." After nine months of Trump in office I was longing for the good old days of Dubya and Chainsaw Cheney.

Bush was an absolute monster, but Trump literally broke brains. America will never be the same.

Not an American but Trump was far more embarrassing to your international reputation than Bush. They're both 2 of the worst presidents you've ever had but Trump is a whole different level of shitty. He's like fascist shitty, whereas Bush was neo-con shitty.

Bush was the worse president, Trump is the worse person.

I can see a lot of potential presidents in 2001 act the same way as Bush did, especially any other Republican. Even Gore would have gone to war in Afghanistan. Unless of course we go down the rabbit hole of could he have prevented the 9/11 attacks. The Iraq war probably would have been avoided under Gore.

But I don't see any other president doing the same damages that Trump did. While the current status of the Republican Party has many people just as bad as Trump, I don't think they would have the same traction today without Trump.

And let's not forget the worst of Trump was prevented. If his coup would have succeeded, he would even be the worse president.

Trump tried to start a civil war, overthrow democracy, and install himself as king. Trumpism is tearing the country apart and trying so very hard to burn it all down. There's no contest.

*Another different way to word it: Bush made terrible decisions. Trump wants to burn it all down.

Potentially? Trump. Factually? Bush. However, to be honest, the American political system seems to be fucked up to the point it doesn't resemble a democracy. Currently, their population suffers from this situation with poverty, addiction to drugs, a corrupt healthcare system, inability to own a home, shitty jobs, etc. So, it really doesn't matter too much which one is worse. Biden or nobody else can fix this from within. But yeah, a second term of Trump would be definitely catastrophic and would compete with Bush's levels of destruction. Right now, the only thing containing Trump is his short term period in power.

Bush was worse for the world, Trump was worse for the US.

One attacked an innocent nation, the other attacked their own people.

It’s hard to say. Bush Jr. gave us both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both of which stretched into decades and cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, however, I’n not sure that any other Republican wouldn’t have done the same. Within 48 hours of 9/11, it seemed like they were already discussing how to tie it to Iraq, which made it seem like it was the plan all along. 9/11 just provided a convenient excuse. Those conflicts also stretched across multiple presidencies, Obama didn’t actually end either one.

Trump, on the other hand, could potentially spell the end of the US as we know it. The court cases against him give me some hope that he himself will be stamped out, but even without him, his followers are still just as dumb and malicious and they’ve infested every nook and cranny of the government like maggots.

The deeper problem is the Russian propaganda machine that helped a dipshit like Trump rise to power in the first place, which is what makes Ukraine so important. If we can break Russia’s back, we can potentially disrupt it at its source, but maybe the vacuum would just get filled by some other foreign power looking to destabilize the US. Trump is a symptom of a deeper issue in America, that someone like him even had a chance in the first place. If anything, we actually got lucky he’s as incompetent as he is and that we’re not already living under a dictatorship.

Depends on the metric. Direct threat to democracy, increasing violence and dangerr for millions of Americans, harming economic futures for Americans, etc.: probably Trump.

Sheer body count: maybe Bush, but don't forget about all the people who would still be alive or more healthy if Trump had not actively sabotaged COVID response.

Okay I'm back to Trump.

That’s like asking what’s worse, herpes or an airborne and highly infectious strain of herpes that also causes cancer and melts your brain faster than syphilis.

Worst for the world was Bush (so you could say Bush was more immoral) but worst for America was Trump (so you could say Trump failed at his job harder.)

Bush's actions killed a staggering number of people on flimsy evidence.

Trump changed phrases like "balkanization of the United States" and "Second US Civil War" from far-off possibilities and fun speculation to serious concerns.

Bush is objectively worse on every level. They’re both terrible and the people in their administrations were both soulless gouls. However, Bush’s administration was far more effective in carrying out their repugnant agenda.

People will say Trump tried to steal an election. That’s true. But Bush ACTUALLY stole the election in 2000. Bush also gave us 2 wars which killed in total over a million people and led to the rise of ISIS. Trump’s admin tried it’s best to get the US into a war with Iran but couldn’t make it happen. Bush’s administration also helped get the US into the Great Recession from which the American working class has never truly recovered. Trump doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of damage Bush inflicted on the US and world.

George W Bush certainly caused more deaths, was just as decisive and is the reason Trump was allowed to happen. OK, so he's got a bit more of a charming personality and gives Michelle Obama candy sometimes, but that doesn't absolve him. Doesn't absolve Trump either, he's a loud mouthed buffoon who tried to start a Civil War. He has followers who will literally do anything he tells them to do. The idea of him having a second term absolutely terrifies me.

For the US, Trump tried to destoy democracy so that's hard to top. And if he gets elected again, he will certainly succeed. For the rest of the world, both are clowns with nuclear weapons so equally dangerous. Trump just didnt had enough time to make as much damage, but what Trump did that Bush didnt, is inspiring right-wingers around thw world, with is deinfornation tactics.

Worse for the world? Bush. Worse for America? Trump. But I don’t really care about America so Bush from me.

Having lived through both presidencies I'd say people thought Bush jr was as dumb a president you could get until trump came along and said hold my beer and made an absoloute farce out of politics

I think Dubya hands down if we're reducing to the presidency. To me Trump represents the absurd spectacle American politics has become, but the worst thing about Trump winning was that the Republicans were able to pass legislation. Trump as an individual wasn't very successful as a politician once he was in power. Trump, Hillary, and Biden are so widely unpopular in general, and Trump barely losing to someone like Biden after one term really drives the point home how meaningless so much of these politics are right now apart from the spectacle they provide. Trump was the spectacle in a pure form, and when the mainstream liberal media was covering him as a frontrunner in early 2016 and reacting to every tweet, that was my first realization this presidency could potentially happen.

Bush and the post-9/11 world I view as the sort of last doubling-down towards the political situation we live in today, and Obama represented the best we can hope for within this system. While Obama was insanely likable as a personality and speaker I never really supported the politics he stood for. Adolph Reed Jr. had the best take on Obama in 1996, now an infamous article since it was really validated post-Obama:

“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

The decrepit political landscape today is a perfect fit for Trump but I don't think he controls it, he's just a mirror that reflects back on itself, it's what goes on in his shadow that's the real danger. I think progressives being so enraptured by Trump's terribleness is another serious issue because of this. Just being "not Trump" has allowed the Democrats to be lax on anything that would upset their donor base. Biden was always a darling of the Israel lobby for instance (why Obama picked him as VP) and we're seeing the effects of this right now. Bernie was a real mobilization and hope for the left and the attacks about him being soft on race etc from liberal progressives was basically an indication of where the Democrat party is. They want the "do-good" version of the same economic system the Republican's want to hand to the barons, and there's no political alternative to this system being offered, just the form it takes. Now there's hope in the increasing labor actions and strikes, an encouraging trend as people are pushed further and further being offered nothing by mainstream politicians.

The interesting thing about how this question plays out in my mind is that it seems obvious Trump is worse, but I feel more annoyed and offended about Bush than Trump, and I think, given I'm not even American, part of why that is, is that a similar feeling lingers with respect to the Australian Prime Minister during Bush's term. A man for whom I feel special kind of hatred, John Howard.

I really fucking hate John Howard despite some of the conservatives that came after him being arguably dumber and more embarrassing and making even crazier decisions. I don't think we ever had our Trump moment despite some spectacularly shit tier leaders since, but nevertheless they were their own special kind of ridiculous. It's a toss up who our closest equivalent is but I'd say probably Tony Abbott followed closely by one of his successors, Scott Morrison.

Where I'm going with this, and how it relates to Bush v. Trump, is that in their case and in the Australian context, it feels like they're responsible if so much of the bad stuff that's gone on since. It's Prime Minister John Howard's fault that we later got Tony Abbot and after him Scott Morrison, and it's John Howard's fault that we got mixed up in Iraq for no godamn reason, and John Howard's fault that perverse cruelty came to be regarded as political courage and strength and also the only viable path towards electoral success.

The thing with Howard, as with Bush, is that they feel to me like they represent the people we got, right at the crossroads point in time when it was still possible to pull back from where we've ended up, and they both failed utterly, seemingly instead to hit the accelerator. At a certain stage when you hear about Donald Trump doing something stupid or asinine or brazenly corrupt, I almost can't summon the will to be mad at him personally. It's now just par for the course and it would feel like getting angry with a chimpanzee for throwing faeces at the wall instead of making sound policy decisions. Yes it's galling that the decisions are so poor and irrational, but at the same time, it's a chimpanzee that somehow got to hold political office so honestly, what did we expect?

I'm not sure exactly when the shift occurred but it feels like somewhere post-Bush and post Howard, we stopped having politicians who, while we won't always agree with, we can assume are acting in what they at least think are everyone's best interests (even if we believe them to be wrong). Instead we moved to no longer even having real candidates with actual goals, just personified contempt and rampant self interest. It's like frail, fallable and flawed human beings, for all their faults, got replaced instead with joke cartoon characters, so it's tough to keep holding them to the same standard because they're not even real candidates just cruel jokes.

This feeling kind of makes me so much angrier with Bush and Howard that they were the last people that could have done something and instead they just let this happen because at least they got to win. The lasting effects both in terms of policy impact and just the overall cultural landscape that they have wrought upon the world are the seeds of every psychopathic lunatic that has since followed them. Tony Abbott, and Donald Trump were basically grown from seeds sown in the nursery of fucked up self interest that those assholes cultivated.

This is a tough question, because trump did lead an attempted coups to overturn democracy, but I’d say Bush W. The forever wars cost so many lives, far more than were killed as a direct result of trump’s actions. While trump’s failure to lead during Covid cost many lives as well, I think the net death toll is still considerably lower compared to Iraq/Afghanistan. And all for oil at that, also not known to be amenable to healthy living.

We joked about W and Cheney cancelling the election. "Bush 2008 - why should the law stop us now?"

The Idiot was responsible for a failed coup.

The part where an angry mob invaded the capital, held back by precious few law enforcement officials, with the entire federal elected government hiding in one location? That was the lesser part. That was the visible mushroom emerging from the mycellum organism that permeated his turd of an administration. In the year leading up to that violent assault on the American government, he'd openly suggested "delaying" the election, on account of the plague he also insisted was fake. He had the Postal Service destroy the literal machinery of democracy with the explicit intent of vilifying and preventing mail-in voting. He extorted a foreign ally in hopes of committing fraud, and just about ruined the State Department with his narcissistic tantrums about getting caught doing those crimes.

George W. Bush was an intolerable authoritarian moron who openly betrayed the ideals of the nation and his duties to its people. We spent seven years constantly terrorized by our own government's vague-but-menacing warnings and gleeful overreactions to attacks they failed to detect.We still have people trapped in an offshore torture prison because of that motherfucker. He was the worst domestic threat the United States had faced since the Business Plot. There was no excuse for ever electing anyone so brazenly corrupt and dishonest ever again. And then The Idiot was worse. The Idiot was orders of magnitude worse, on every possible front, without one god-damn iota of ambiguity or disguise. Republicans nominated and installed an incompetent criminal fascist.

They are trying to do it again.

The party is complicit and must be dismantled.

Public opinion was very much in favor of the war in Afghanistan after 9/11. Maybe not so much Iraq, but it's hard to blame Bush squarely for those wars when they had bipartisan support.

Bush is done doing damage to our country, and might actually be considered a voice of reason compared to today's Republicans.

It's definitely already Trump, and he's not even done doing damage yet.

Even if Republicans elect someone who is identical to Trump in his words, views, and actions, that person would still be better for the country than Trump. It's critically important for the justice department to hold him accountable for the insurrection and trying to overthrow our democracy, or it WILL happen again.

Yes

Bush was bad. But Trump was dangerous.

Like, if Bush were somehow to be elected again I wouldn't be alarmed, I'd be annoyed.

Bush may have started devastating wars that lasted for decades, but I blame Trump for the war in Ukraine. There have been no worse war since WWII. And it may have been prevented if Ukraine would've received the military assistance during his Presidency they were asking for before Russia invaded.

Bush. But most people will say Trump simply because its more recent.

of the two, Trump did more damage while he was president and had the bigger riot when he lost the popular vote, but Bush's legacy of damage lasted from when he launched his forever wars in 02 all the way into the Biden administration

Bush. The war crimes are inexcusable

Especially galling was "W" making a "funny" video where he pretended he was looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Quite the pos in retrospect.

ETA: Found it, sorry quality is so poor. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5YgJx8VGRA

Definitely Trump. Tried to subvert democracy, wholly unprofessional attitude as president (in my opinion the first president to not even attempt "rising to the office" at all), handled the economy with the tact of a middle schooler, and (allegedly) divulged / kept classified documents. He is also a civilly liable rapist. All of this I think makes Trump the third worst president of all time, behind James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce.

George Bush is easily the second worst president in modern history, his initial response to 9/11 was a highpoint, but afterwards he started a useless war and, although he incorrectly wouldn't see it this way, bent at the knee to terrorism by subverting constitutional rights for the purposes of mass searches and seizures of information without a warrant or reasonable cause. (i.e. Patriot Act). It's been a while since I hashed out a whole list, but I believe I had Bush somewhere between 7th and 12th worst or so.

Both are absolute pieces of shit.

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Bush, but he had a more classy kind of dumb evil. The kind where you keep your mouth shut. Dumb evil + mouth that won't shut up is just unbearable in the moment. But looking back historically I think Bush's actual actions as a leader will appear the most fucked up in recent history. This is like comparing unstoppable diarrhea to constipation so bad you are vomiting shit though.

George literally succeeded at doing a coup through the Supreme court

Bush was worse internationally, Trump was worse domestically. If he got one more term, who'd know?

Bush was much worse in effect, because his administration was much more competent. Our most recent former President was a worse person and an awful President domestically, but was largely ineffective at actual bad governance.

Trump, hands down. Bush at least tried to be a president.

Woodrow fucking Wilson. Worst. President. Ever.

https://youtu.be/hLiI6kXZkZI?si=6y30QFjWbyNEaEFO

This question is probably worth revisiting after 2024's election, since Trump may still have more mileage. A second term might be more dangerous than the first was. Assuming he doesn't win, then his legacy will mostly be all of the weird and slightly hard to measure changes to American culture, specifically conservative political culture.

He generally seems to have made more dangerous ideas popular but also to have made getting a governing coalition together to actually enact those ideas more difficult by eroding the Republican party. Bush's foreign policy decisions seem to have been far more dangerous so I think I'd vote for Bush being the worst as of right now.

That said, Trump still has a non-zero chance of bringing real American fascism into power so that would change things.

Bush is/was a better person but had a worse presidency. He got swept up in the popular sentiment post 9/11 and enacted unconstitutional law and bad foreign policies. That said I'd rather get lunch with Bush than with Trump. Plus Trump's legacy probably won't be as big as Bush's was.

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Anyone who says trump was worse should not be taken seriously about politics, all they care about is feeling good about their country and being able to ignore politics. Bush killed half a million Iraqis in service of oil company quarterly earnings, it's not even close.

Clearly trump done the biggest long term damage, what will lead to more serious problems in usa, and not just in usa... putin was encouraged by trump's direction of making US stop being world police... however trump was just servin his master 😆

Edit: i see tankies are here

You can’t be serious.

Bush was way worse, he only made me laugh like twice. Trump was rolling on the floor riot laughing, especially when he brought out his little accordion. What a legend.

If Trump leads to the end of America and it's sham democracy, he will be the greatest president the world has ever had. But liberals can't stand to call America the bad guy.

Trump started WW3 by initiating covid lockdowns and trying to use enormous money supply expansion to somehow offset the predictable economic ruin from the lockdowns.

Biden’s continuing what Trump started, but Trump started it. In fact, I’d say the covid lockdowns were a bipartisan effort to start WW3 (not on purpose of course just total negligence that they pretended not to understand how things work).

So while Bush’s actions ended the American Way, Trump’s actions may just end our civilization.

Trump: Started 0 wars. Caused 0 economic crises. Bush: Started 2 wars (Iraq, Afghanistan). Caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.