Why are we nostalgic for George W. Bush?
With old 43 popping up on morning television and viral BFF stories with Michelle Obama, there’s a lot of sweet feelings circulating for George W. Bush in the last week. I think we feel warm and fuzzy about him now because he no longer has the will to power that made him scary as Commander in Chief. Now he’s just a benign ex-president, ruminating on his old job.
We were amused by Trump before he had a will to power. He was a big dumb buffoon, a rich doofus who tried to compensate for his own emotional emptiness with big gold buildings and big fake boobs and big dumb TV shows. You can tolerate a lovable dumbass in the entertainment space. But when they show that will to power, and that lovable dumbass starts tapping racial resentment as a political strategy, and shows active disinterest in learning about how government works or any other learning, he becomes a threat.
George W. Bush wasn’t a dumbass, he just wasn’t eloquent. We criticized him as incurious, and rigidly ideological, but he read voraciously and understood history. He wasn’t a great president, but he was conventional, and he was surrounded by competent administrators even if we disliked their ideology. I didn’t vote for him, but when he was elected in 2000 I felt encouraged that people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were in the room with him. His administration was run like a presidential administration. We can’t say the same for anything that has happened since January 18.
Trump is incompetent and surrounded by incompetence. Folks who voted for him were conned into thinking he brought some kind of expertise to the table. He doesn’t. His only ace in the hole was business — something he’s a failure at, hiding copious amounts of debt while screwing small business owners on every project. And just as Trump was using white nationalists to fuel his campaign, they were using him to project some kind of legitimacy to their views and secure a voice at the table in the White House. So folks who voted for him got conned, just like giving money to a grifter who tells a convincing story. Trump spinned a yarn that resonated with a lot of Americans. But it was still a yarn, a pure fabrication that people wanted to believe. And now neoconservatism feels quaint when white nationalism is being spelled out every day in executive orders.
After his Joint Address, the media was grabbing at straws to suggest that he projected a presidential air, merely because he read words good from a teleprompter. But there was nothing encouraging about Trump’s Joint Address. Trump has recently fired his National Security Advisor for lying to him about Russian contact. His Attorney General has just been exposed for lying under oath to the Senate about Russian contact. Vice President Pence used an AOL address to hide official communications as governor of Indiana and got hacked after Trump centered his campaign around “questions” about Hillary Clinton’s private email server. And Trump’s EPA chief used a private email address to stay cozy with oil and gas interests off the books in Oklahoma. This administration is a roiling cesspool of the kind of corruption Trump kicked and screamed about in his campaign. And far from draining the swamp, he wants us to call him a hero for settling right into the slime.
It’s not hard to see why this would make us warm and fuzzy for W. We don’t have time to unpack all Bush’s warmongering and false intelligence and corporate cronyism and expansion of executive power that came with Bush’s will to power because we’re dealing with Trump’s constant barrage of lies, policy bumbling and political distractionism. All of this comes from an administration that is sweaty with the will to power — and we can see it. We can feel it. It’s gross to watch. It’s sickening to feel. It’s not just time that’s making us nostalgic for Bush. It’s watching an incompetent creep parlay his own privilege into disaster for everyone else—and call it a victory.