Ever since Donald Trump's got elected, there has been a lot of nostalgia for good old G.W. I'll admit, that when Trump first got elected I was completely willing to hop on that bandwagon and did so for a brief period of time. Here's the thing, I and everyone seemed to immediately hop on this bandwagon before Trump even completed a month in office. Whether it be social media circles or Reddit itself there has been an ongoing phenomenon of missing the good old Bush Republican years. Full disclaimer: I'm politically coming from a moderate democratic viewpoint and I really think Trump was a terrible idea. However, after a few months of being on the Bush nostalgia bandwagon I came to a realization that it was ludicrous. So let me explain some of my reasoning.

First, there's a few giant elephants in the room that none of us can really ignore when looking at the "Lil' Bush" Presidency. 9/11 is where it all starts. The administration failed on so many levels when the intelligence community was warning them. Below is just one article but there were numerous problems going into his administration including staffing shortages.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?referer=https://www.google.com/

Now I'm not a going into conspiracy theories and no 9/11 was not an inside job but there was a lot more that could have been done in order to possibly prevent it. From there after September 11 we decided to invade Afghanistan. Here's the thing about the War in Afghanistan. It was actually kind of justifiable. A guy admits to his terrorist network being responsible for 9/11, that country doesn't hand him over, so we invade. There were justifications for it that seemed reasonable at the time so I'll give the administration some understanding on that one. However, they completely failed at an exit strategy and now 17 years later we are still in that country. Bin Laden has been dead for about 7 years now.

Then we invaded Iraq. For what? Saddam had nuclear weapons? Oh it's to liberate the Iraqi people? Wait what? Look Saddam was terrible but the Bush administration sold that to the American people on bulls$&@ and we all know and now look. ISIS came out due to the instabilities created by our involvement in that country. And again, no exit strategy whatsoever. Allegedly, there was also a lot of corruption involved in the decision to go into Iraq and Dick Cheney people at the top allegedly had a lot to gain by us going into Iraq. But none of it's really completely proven. Even taking out the corruption the fact is we still invaded on entire country on faulty intelligence and even with that faulty intelligence Iraq was not a threat. Even if they had a nuke or two there was no way they could or would actually have hit a US target and there was almost no way Saddam was working with Bin Laden due to so many of the ideological differences between the two. So again, basically no reason to invade this country.

So, those are the big two. So now we have the Patriot Act, which admittedly was congresses fault too. The budget deficit that started under Bush. The beginning of Drone warfare. The beginning of mass surveillance (continued under Obama and Trump). The economic crisis which led to a bailout that began under Bush and continued under Obama. The end of the "assault weapons" ban in 2004. One of The worst disaster responses ever i.e. Katrina. Neverending involvement in the middle East. No child left behind was kind of a failure. Then there's the incidents at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib that happened underneath him. You can say that some of these things weren't necessarily his fault but policy starts at the top and in the military it all trickles down hill. So basically he was a pretty horrible President.

Now let's get to Trump. First, I completely disagree with almost all of his policies (he's made some reasonable statements on gun control but goes back and forth). He sounds like an idiot on stage (because that's what the Presidency is now, a stage). He thinks the wall is going to get built. He's continuing wars in the Middle East but Bush really started them and Obama didn't end them so I won't count that too much against him. He lowered taxes for super rich people but Bush did that too. He kind of screwed with the ACA but the ACA was kind of screwing itself too. He's made us look like an idiot to the world and maybe hurt some of our alliances but Bush did that too (remember when they wanted us to stop calling them fucking french fries?). He got north Korea to threaten us with nukes but they've been doing that for a while and his stupidity may show to help the situation with recent news events (although I don't think it will). He's racist? Yes. That's actually about all that Trump verifiably would have over GW on being worse. His racism is shitty and this doesn't excuse it but holy shit he's not the one that started bombing Arabs and he wasn't the first president to have deportations (those surprisingly escalated under Obama as well).

Do I think Trump is a shit President? Yes, absolutely. Do I think action and policy wise he's doing worse than Lil' Bush. No, no I don't. He's still in the middle East but Obama was the one that was supposed to get us out of there and he's not the one that started in the first place. The ACA was far from perfect but yet he hasn't completely dismantled it and even what he was proposing to replace it, was miles ahead of the Bush Administration on health care. He's given tax cuts to super rich people but so have all other Republican presidents for a while now. I might add that much of the so called division in America in my opinion is a result of the Bush years. Between the economic situation and the war it started a lot of problems. As per the rules of this subreddit I'm open to having my views changed and honestly kind of want them changed by I can't objectively see Trump as worse than Bush.

TL;Dr Bus was far worse than Trump could ever be. Bush is more of a cause for many of our current problems and Trump can't really be blamed for following Republican business as usual.

This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules. If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us. Happy CMVing!