I doubt that I’m the only person who, in the early days of the Trump presidency, fevered with desperate patriotism and fervent hope that the center might still hold, at some point imagined that our living former presidents might issue some sort of joint statement against Donald Trump, in the event we were to reach an unforeseen precipice of dingbat authoritarianism in the not-too-distant future. It would be a sort of torch of executive celebrity and authority held up against the darkness of our reality TV chief exec. I wasn’t sure what they’d say or do, exactly: but it would be decisive in moving public opinion.
I also doubt I’m the only person who felt a falling of spirit when we realized that this scenario necessarily involved the participation of the irredeemable George W. Bush.
I’m reminded today of this presidents-to-the-rescue fantasy by Dubya’s rare political speech at the George W. Bush Institute, in which his remarks included more or less explicit criticisms of the current president:
"Our identity as a nation, unlike other nations, is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood [. . .] This means that people from every race, religion, ethnicity can be full and equally American. It means that bigotry and white supremacy, in any form, is blasphemy against the American creed.”
I’m willing to grant that Bush is indeed speaking in reference to Donald Trump — but I’m far less willing to grant his words any importance, much less any moral authority.
George W. Bush’s abuse of the public trust in the wake of the terrifying 9/11 attacks is one of the most immoral, consequential, and disastrous acts in all of American history. Not only did he greenlight the invasion of Afghanistan, leading to what is now the longest war in U.S. history, but his administration subsequently lied and manipulated the country into invading Iraq — a country that had absolutely zero connection to 9/11 and next to zero involvement with any actual terrorist threat to the U.S. His administration suggested Iraqi connections to 9/11 — those were lies. His administration suggested that Iraq was close to developing nuclear weapons — those were also lies.
The disastrous consequences of this decision reverberate to the current day, among which must be counted the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, along with the thousands of American servicemen and servicewomen lost in a war whose ultimate purpose became to patch up the consequences of George W.’s catastrophically stupid decision to start the war in the first place.
Not only did W. gin up a war on false pretenses, he then oversaw an invasion and occupation of Iraq in which idiocy vied with incompetence for first prize, in which the president’s stated vision for a democratic Iraq was in no way matched by the application of the appropriate resources or strategy. This is all well-documented, and as I’ve already said, the human toll is nearly incomprehensible. This is to say nothing of the destabilization of the greater Middle East as a consequence of the invasion. Bush may never have been impeached for his actions, but at the very least we can’t ever forget the enormity of the crime or its vast cost.
On top of this, of course, he led the country into an open-ended, militarized war on terror that continues to this day. And let’s not ignore the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, or the fact that he presided over the development and outbreak of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
But even this is not all of it. George W.’s words today invoke the many ways he lacks the slightest moral authority to pronounce upon our current political situation not least because they remind various observers of one of the less well-remembered scandals of his White House — the firing of U.S. attorneys in an effort to implement a plan to suppress voting by minorities. This is the man who today is being praised for assailing Donald Trump’s bigotry — the man whose administration engineered policies abusing the role of the Justice Department, policies that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is now preparing to supercharge in the name of Making America White Again.
And lest you think that his anti-minority attitudes were just in the past — turns out that this week George W. has been campaigning for Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia. Gillespie is running a Trumpian, anti-immigrant campaign that is widely viewed as a test case of whether such tactics can bring the GOP success in state contests.
One of the more sickening developments of the past several years, and more so over the past year or two, is the idea that perhaps George W. wasn’t so bad after all. After all, hey, what about all those naive paintings he does now in his spare time? And he's a veritable political titan next to Trump, right? Well, no. George W. Bush is a failed president whose reputation was perversely protected by how much the country was distracted by trying to clean up his messes, and now by how hideous the next GOP president has turned out to be. But make no mistake — at least at this point, it is safe to say that George W. Bush inflicted far more damage on the U.S. than Trump has.
Racism and bigotry have been the GOP’s special sauce for decades now. Donald Trump just brought this out into the open. When George W. tries to take the moral high ground, it’s to our country’s detriment that his past means that we have one less president who can speak with moral authority at this time of crisis. And it’s our loss when we lose sight of the fact that not just Donald Trump, but the party that nominated him, has long exploited race to keep Americans divided. George W. Bush has no further credible role to play in our national politics, except as a reminder of how incuriosity, immorality, and hideously bad judgment can combine to create disasters almost beyond imagining, and how the GOP has long played the race card from the bottom of a dirty deck.
