Keith Parsons: Worst?!
Guest essay, 8 October 2025
THE FIRST WORST
Donald Trump is uniquely execrable. The most unprecedented thing about the commentary on him is how often the word “unprecedented” has to be used. For one instance among very many, his corruption is unprecedented. When Jimmy Carter became president, he put his peanut farm in a blind trust. The Trump family bellies up to the trough in the spirit of the Renaissance pope who declared, “The Lord has given us the papacy, and now let us enjoy it!”
Pope Leo X (pope, 1513-1521)
Trump is cashing in big time:
So in very many ways Trump and his odious administration have set new lows. How low can they go? There is no bottom. (Cue the Horst Wessel Lied.)
However, the unique awfulness of Trump can make it all too easy to forget the first worst: George W. Bush. Indeed, I would argue that the extreme awfulness of the two Bush terms prefigured and prepared the way for the even more abysmal awfulness of the Trump terms. That is, the horrors of the Bush years, 2001-2009, inured us to the fact that presidents can commit acts of sheer evil and pay no price—even before the Supreme Court officially gave them that permission. Our cynicism was hardened and our capacity for shock exhausted. Why are people not more outraged by Trump? Why do the media still so often contort themselves into pretzel shapes to normalize his madness? Perhaps, like Macbqeth, we have “Supped full with horrors,” and have seen so much awfulness that our senses have been dulled to it.
My thesis, then, is that the disaster that is Trump is perhaps unique, awful in ways that no previous presidency was, but this is like saying that World War II was awful in ways that World War I was not. Yet the First World War had already made the unthinkable thinkable. As Richard Rhodes puts it, the long grave was already dug.
So let me remind people of just how bad the George W. Bush administration was. My aim is not in any way to make Trump look any better. On the contrary, I think that the W presidency lowered our expectations about the presidency to such a degree that the even more odious Trump does not shock and appall us as he should.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush was visiting an elementary school classroom where the lesson was to read My Pet Goat. When an aide whispered to him that America was under attack, he sat for several minutes with a deer-in-headlights look. A small man in way over his head. Soon, though, he appeared at ground zero and, with arm draped around a firefighter, promised swift retribution. However, the prime target of that retribution, Osama bin Laden, escaped him. Instead, the neocons in his administration saw the attack as a godsend, a golden opportunity to invade Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein, and try out their crackpot theories of nation building.
One problem: Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, Hussein and bin Laden hated each other. No problem. A campaign of lies manufactured bogus connections between Saddam and al Qaida. Intelligence was distorted and manipulated. The lies were allied with fear mongering. Saddam Hussein had supposedly developed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that could be unleashed on the United States. When it was objected that there was no “smoking gun” indicating Saddam’s possession of WMDs, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice famously replied, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Oooh. Scary.
But there were no WMDs. The whole case for a war on Iraq was a farrago of lies and delusions. Millions of people in the US and around the world demonstrated against a war. Nevertheless, on March 20, 2003, the attack on Iraq began with the “shock and awe” of massive bombardments. American forces were soon in Baghdad. Saddam fled and on April 9 his statue in Firdos Square was toppled. Six weeks after the beginning of the war Bush landed in a fighter jet on the deck of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Looking every inch a Tom Cruise top gun clone in his flight suit, he strode to a podium under a massive “Mission Accomplished” banner.
But the war was just beginning and lasted beyond the Bush presidency until December 2011. A massive insurgency threw Iraq into turmoil and killed more than 4000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. The country was plunged into civil war and millions of refugees were driven from their homes. The neocons certainly had egg on their faces. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) left many American soldiers without faces.
Some people did profit from the war. The Halliburton Corporation (Dick Cheney was its former CEO) did very well with its no-bid contract. With its former subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root they made much money providing soldiers with contaminated food and water and defective housing, including work so shoddy that soldiers were electrocuted taking showers. No shit:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/kbr-got-bonuses-work-killed-soldiers/
Then there was torture and other grotesque violations of human rights. Shocking photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison showed naked Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and abused by American guards. Famously, lawyers for the Bush administration wrote to authorize the employment of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e., torture, notably including water boarding which gave the victim the feeling of drowning. Prisoners swept up in Afghanistan on the flimsiest of pretexts were shipped to Gitmo, at the US military base at Guantanamo, Cuba, where they were held in rigorous conditions without trial in indefinite detention.
Then there was what they did to Americans. On August 29, 2005, category three Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. At first, it seemed that the damage was not too severe. Then the levees broke. New Orleans was flooded and 1400 people died in the financially costliest natural disaster in US history. George W. Bush was on vacation at his Texas ranch and was not quick to bestir himself. Michael Brown, the blithering idiot Bush had put in charge of FEMA, was a study in confused helplessness. The federal response to the disaster was slow, badly coordinated, and wholly inadequate. In addition to the iconic images of people stranded on their rooftops and huddled in the Superdome, one indelible scene was Bush telling “Brownie” that he had done a “heckuva job.” Ever since, “You’ve done a heckuva job, Brownie” has come to mean that you have fucked up as badly as humanly possible.
In one of his very few honest moments, Bush was caught on camera addressing a gathering of the uber-rich. He called them the “haves and the have-mores,” and assured them that he regarded them as “his base.” True to his base, he awarded them a fat tax cut. The rest of us didn’t make out so well. The budget surplus left by Bill Clinton was quickly squandered. Indeed, such was the general incompetence of the Bush administration that it challenged our whole view of Republicans, as Garrison Keillor noted:
You might not have always liked Republicans, but you could count on them to manage the bank. They might be lousy tippers, act snooty, talk through their noses, wear spats, and splash mud on you as they raced their Pierce Arrows through the village, but you knew they could do the math. To see them produce a ninny and then follow him loyally into the swamp for eight years was disconcerting.
Yet in one way the Bush administration was very efficient. They spied on Americans as no one had before. In late 2002, Bush signed a secret order authorizing the National Security Agency to engage in warrantless, illegal spying on everyone. You never could tell where those evildoers might be hiding, so Big W was watching you!
Actually, Trump may have learned a thing or two from W. Don’t like regulatory agencies and their tendency to inconvenience your corporate friends? Well, if you can’t just eliminate them, put industry shills and lobbyists in charge who will let their corporate buddies pollute, clear cut, and ignore regulations to their hearts’ content. Bankers were set free to take huge risks with other people’s money. Justice Department not pursuing your agenda with sufficient alacrity? Put in an ideologue like John Ashcroft or an apparatchik like Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and have justice your way! Oh, and if science gets pesky with its fixation on inconvenient realities and tedious insistence on evidence, you just obscure, obstruct, and censor. Sound familiar?
Like Trump, Bush sucked up to the religious right. He declared same sex marriage an “abomination” and recommended a constitutional amendment to ban it. Indeed, his 2004 presidential campaign has been characterized as one of “fears, smears, and queers.” Fear of terrorism, smearing John Kerry, and playing the gay card to the hilt. Trump has slightly modified this by focusing the aspersion on trans people. Just as Trump appeased the fundies by his Supreme Court nominations, so Bush gave them the hard right zealot Samuel Alito. He offered further appeasement by sponsoring “faith based initiatives,” thwarting vital stem cell research, and promoting worthless “abstinence only” sex education. As for Christian charity, he vetoed SCHIP health insurance for children.
Remember those bankers who were left free to do creative things with your money? Well, at the end of the Bush presidency that house of cards finally collapsed and America sank into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the thirties. Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in America imploded and filed for bankruptcy. Panic swept through financial and banking institutions.
Lewis Black
Actually, the panic was probably best captured by comedian Lewis Black. Black is my favorite comedian because he is a pissed off old man like me. He told of how we had all been assured that the hands-off approach to the banking business would produce the beautiful fruit of prosperity for all of us. Black said he went to bed one night dreaming of his beautiful fruit, and the next morning he turned on the TV and saw the secretary of the treasury running around the White House with his hair on fire screaming
“We’re fucked! We’re fucked! We’re totally fucked!”
We were, and it occurred on Bush’s watch.
I am just scratching the surface here. Whole thick books have been written detailing the awfulness of the Bush presidency. You can add your own favorite examples of his malfeasance, misfeasance, and just plain rottenness. I hated George W. Bush passionately. Remarkably, I have heard others who disdained him as much as I and who have said that they would rather have W back than Trump. W set a very low bar and Trump has slithered under it. After Watergate, the American people yearned for a return of honesty, openness, and integrity to government. Now we yearn for freedom of speech. As the bar is lowered, our yearnings lower also.
How long before our main yearning is to get out of the concentration camp?
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How long? Well the It Can't Happen Here crowd (Nichols at The Atlantic, Edsall at the Times) have both said that, well, mayyyybe it could. They're being diplomatic in the old saw about when a diplomat says yes he means maybe, when he says maybe he means no ...