George W. Bush calls withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO troops from Afghanistan "a mistake"

  Just fuck that guy.

"The Worst President in History" (Tim Naftali)

Three particular failures secure Trump’s status as the worst chief executive ever to hold the office.

 

.... as his four years in office draw to an end, there’s only one title to which he can lay claim: Donald Trump is the worst president America has ever had.

 

In December 2019, he became the third president to be impeached. Last week, Trump entered a category all his own, becoming the first president to be impeached twice. But impeachment, which depends in part on the makeup of Congress, is not the most objective standard. What does being the worst president actually mean? And is there even any value, at the bitter end of a bad presidency, in spending energy on judging a pageant of failed presidencies?

 

It is helpful to think of the responsibilities of a president in terms of the two elements of the oath of office set forth in the Constitution. In the first part, presidents swear to “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States.” This is a pledge to properly perform the three jobs the presidency combines into one: head of state, head of government, and commander in chief. In the second part, they promise to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

 

Trump was a serial violator of his oath—as evidenced by his continual use of his office for personal financial gain—but focusing on three crucial ways in which he betrayed it helps clarify his singular historical status. First, he failed to put the national-security interests of the United States ahead of his own political needs. Second, in the face of a devastating pandemic, he was grossly derelict, unable or unwilling to marshal the requisite resources to save lives while actively encouraging public behavior that spread the disease. And third, held to account by voters for his failures, he refused to concede defeat and instead instigated an insurrection, stirring a mob that stormed the Capitol.

 

Many chief executives have failed, in one way or another, to live up to the demands of the job, or to competently discharge them. But historians now tend to agree that our worst presidents are those who fall short in the second part of their pledge, in some way endangering the Constitution. And if you want to understand why these three failures make Trump the worst of all our presidents, the place to begin is in the basement of the presidential rankings, where dwell his rivals for that singular dishonor.

 (snip)

Does Trump have any modern competitors for the title of worst president? Like Harding, a number of presidents were poor executors of the office. President Woodrow Wilson was an awful man who presided over an apartheid system in the nation’s capital, largely confined his support for democracy abroad to white nations, and then mishandled a pandemic. President Herbert Hoover helped drive the U.S. economy into the ground during the Great Depression, because the economics he learned as a young man proved fundamentally wrong.

President George W. Bush’s impulse after 9/11 to weaken American civil liberties in the name of protecting them, and his blanket approval of interrogation techniques universally considered torture, left Americans disillusioned and impeded the struggle to deradicalize Islamists. His invasion of Iraq in 2003, like Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on foreign trade during the Napoleonic Wars, had disastrous consequences for American power, and undermined unity at home and abroad.

 

These presidents were each deeply flawed, but not in the same league as their predecessors who steered the country into Civil War or did their utmost to deprive formerly enslaved people of their hard-won rights while rewarding those who betrayed their country.

 

And then there’s Richard Nixon.

 

Before Trump, Nixon set the standard for modern presidential failure as the first president forced from office, who resigned ahead of impeachment. And in many ways, their presidencies have been eerily parallel. But the comparison to Nixon reveals the ways in which Trump’s presidency has been not merely bad, but the very worst we have ever seen.

 

Like the 45th president, Nixon ascended to office by committing an original sin. As the Republican presidential nominee, Nixon intervened indirectly to scuttle peace negotiations in Paris over the Vietnam War. He was worried that a diplomatic breakthrough in the 11th hour of the campaign would help his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey. For Nixon, it set the pattern for future presidential lies and cover-ups.

 

Trump, too, put his political prospects ahead of any sense of duty. As a candidate, Trump openly appealed to Russia to steal his opponent’s emails. Then, as Russia dumped hacked emails from her campaign chair, he seized on the pilfered materials to suggest wrongdoing and amplified Russian disinformation efforts. Extensive investigations during his administration by then–Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee didn’t produce any evidence suggesting that he directly abetted Russian hacking, but those investigations were impeded by a pattern of obstructive conduct that Mueller carefully outlined in his report.

 

Trump’s heartless and incompetent approach to immigration, his use of tax policy to punish states that didn’t vote for him, his diversion of public funds to properties owned by him and his family, his impulsive and self-defeating approach to trade, and his petulance toward traditional allies assured on their own that he would not be seen as a successful modern president. But those failures have more to do with the first part of his oath. The case that Trump is not just the worst of our modern presidents but the worst of them all rests on three other pillars, not all of which have a Nixonian parallel.

 

Trump is the first president since America became a superpower to subordinate national-security interests to his political needs. 

Nixon’s mishandling of renewed peace negotiations with Hanoi in the 1972 election campaign led to the commission of a war crime, the unnecessary “Christmas bombing” at the end of that year. But it cannot compare, in terms of the harm to U.S. national interests, to Trump’s serial subservience to foreign strongmen such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and, of course, Russia’s Vladimir Putin—none of whom act out of a sense of shared interests with the United States. 

Trump’s effort to squeeze the Ukrainians to get dirt on his likely opponent in 2020, the cause of his first impeachment, was just the best-documented instance of a form of corruption that characterized his entire foreign policy.

 

The second pillar is Trump’s dereliction of duty during the COVID-19 pandemic, which will have killed at least 400,000 Americans by the time he leaves office. In his inaugural address, Trump vowed an end to “American carnage,” but in office, he presided over needless death and suffering. Trump’s failure to anticipate and then respond to the pandemic has no equivalent in Nixon’s tenure; when Nixon wasn’t plotting political subversion and revenge against his perceived enemies, he could be a good administrator.

 (snip)

Trump continued to insist that he was in charge of America’s coronavirus response, but when being in charge required him to actively oversee plans—or at least to read and approve them—he punted on the tough issues of ramping up testing, and was painfully slow to secure sufficient protective equipment and ventilators. FDR didn’t directly manage the Liberty ship program, but he grasped its necessity and understood how to empower subordinates. Trump, instead, ignored his own experts and advisers, searching constantly for some silver bullet that would relieve him of the necessity of making hard choices. He threw money at pharmaceutical and biotech firms to accelerate work on vaccines, with good results, but went AWOL on the massive logistical effort administering those vaccines requires.

 

In doubling down on his opposition to basic public-health measures, the president crossed a new line of awfulness. Three of Trump’s tweets on April 17, 2020—“LIBERATE VIRGINIA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” and “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”—moved him into Pierce and Buchanan territory for the first time: The president was promoting disunity. The “liberation” he was advocating was civil disobedience against stay-at-home rules put in place by governors who were listening to public-health experts. Trump then organized a series of in-person rallies that sickened audience members and encouraged a wider public to put themselves at risk.

 

Trump channeled the same divisive spirit that Pierce and Buchanan had tapped by turning requests from the governors of the states that had been the hardest hit by the coronavirus into opportunities for partisan and sectarian attack.

 

Fifty-eight thousand Americans had already died of the virus when Trump signaled that ignoring or actively violating public-health mandates was a patriotic act. Over the summer, even as the death toll from COVID mounted, Trump never stopped bullying civic leaders who promoted mask wearing, and continued to hold large in-person rallies, despite the risk of spreading the virus. When the president himself became sick in the fall, rather than being sobered by his personal brush with serious illness, the president chose to turn a potential teachable moment for many Americans into a grotesque carnival. He used his presidential access to experimental treatment to argue that ordinary Americans need not fear the disease. He even took a joyride around Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in his closed, armored SUV to bask in the glow of his supporters’ adulation while endangering the health of his Secret Service detail.

 

American presidents have a mixed record with epidemics. For every Barack Obama, whose administration professionally managed the threats from Ebola and the H1N1 virus, or George W. Bush, who tackled AIDS in Africa, there’s been a Woodrow Wilson, who mishandled the influenza pandemic, or a Ronald Reagan, who was derelict in the face of AIDS. But neither Reagan nor Wilson actively promoted risky behavior for political purposes, nor did they personally obstruct federal-state partnerships that had been intended to control the spread of disease. On those points, Trump stands alone.

 

The third pillar of the case against Trump is his role as the chief instigator of the attempted insurrection of January 6. Although racism and violent nativism preceded Trump, the seeds of what happened on January 6 were planted by his use of the presidential bully pulpit. No president since Andrew Johnson had so publicly sympathized with the sense of victimhood among racists. In important ways, Nixon prefigured Trump by conspiring with his top lieutenants to use race, covertly, to bring about a realignment in U.S. politics. Nixon’s goal was to lure racists away from the Democratic Party and so transform the Republican Party into a governing majority. Trump has gone much further. From his remarks after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to his effort to set the U.S. military against the Black Lives Matter movement, Trump has openly used race in an effort to transform the Republican Party into an agitated, cult-like, white-supremacist minority movement that could win elections only through fear, disenfranchisement, and disinformation.

 

Both Trump and Nixon sought to subvert any serious efforts to deny them reelection. Nixon approved a dirty-tricks campaign, and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman approved the details of an illegal espionage program against the eventual Democratic nominee. Nixon won his election but ultimately left office in the middle of his second term because the press, the Department of Justice, and Congress uncovered his efforts to hide his role in this subversion. They were helped in large part by Nixon’s absentminded taping of his own conversations.

 

Trump never won reelection. Instead, he mounted the first effort by a defeated incumbent to use the power of his office to overturn a presidential election. Both men looked for weaknesses in the system to retain power. But Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election put him in a class of awfulness all by himself. 

 
(snip)

 

It was at this point that Trump went far beyond Nixon, or any of his other predecessors. In 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in U.S. v. Nixon that Nixon had to turn over his White House tapes to a special prosecutor, Nixon also ran out of constitutional options. He knew that the tapes proved his guilt, and would likely lead to his impeachment and then to his conviction in the Senate. On July 24, Nixon said he would comply with the order from a coequal branch of our government, and ultimately accepted his political fate. In the end, even our most awful presidents before 2017 believed in the continuation of the system they had taken an oath to defend.

 

But not Trump. Heading into January 6, 2021, when Congress would ritually certify the election, Trump knew that he lacked the Electoral College votes to win or the congressional votes to prevent certification. He had only two cards left to play—neither one of which was consistent with his oath. He pushed Vice President Mike Pence to use his formal constitutional role as the play-by-play announcer of the count to unconstitutionally obstruct it, sending it back to the states for recertification. Meanwhile, to maintain pressure on Pence and Republicans in Congress, he gathered some of his most radicalized followers on the Mall and pointed the way to the Capitol, where the electoral count was about to begin. When Pence refused to exceed his constitutional authority, Trump unleashed his mob. He clearly wanted the count to be disrupted.

 

On January 6, Trump’s legacy was on a knife’s edge. Trump likely knew Pence’s intentions when he began to speak to the mob. He knew that the vice president would disappoint his hopes. In riling up the mob and sending it down Pennsylvania Avenue, he was imperiling the safety of his vice president and members of Congress. If there was any doubt that he was willing to countenance violence to get his way, it disappeared in the face of the president’s long inaction, as he sat in the White House watching live footage of the spreading assault.

 

(snip) 

 

As Trump prepares to leave Washington, the capital is more agitated than during any previous presidential transition since 1861, with thousands of National Guard troops deployed around the city. There have been serious threats to previous inaugurations. But for the first time in the modern era, those threats are internal. An incumbent president is being asked to discourage terrorism by supporters acting in his name.

 

There are many verdicts on Donald Trump still to come, from the Senate, from juries of private citizens, from scholars and historians. But as a result of his subversion of national security, his reckless endangerment of every American in the pandemic, and his failed insurrection on January 6, one thing seems abundantly clear: Trump is the worst president in the 232-year history of the United States.

 

So, why does this matter? If we have experienced an unprecedented political trauma, we should be prepared to act to prevent any recurrence. Nixon’s fall introduced an era of government reform—expanded privacy rights, overhauled campaign-finance rules, presidential-records preservation, and enhanced congressional oversight of covert operations.

 

Managing the pandemic must be the incoming Biden administration’s principal focus, but it needn’t be its only focus. Steps can be taken to ensure that the worst president ever is held to account, and to forestall a man like Trump ever abusing his power in this way again.

 

The first is to ensure that we preserve the record of what has taken place. As was done after the Nixon administration, Congress should pass a law establishing guidelines for the preservation of and access to the materials of the Trump presidency. Those guidelines should also protect nonpartisan public history at any public facility associated with the Trump era. The Presidential Records Act already puts those documents under the control of the archivist of the United States, but Congress should mandate that they be held in the D.C. area and that the National Archives should not partner with the Trump Foundation in any public-history efforts. Disentangling the federal Nixon Presidential Library from Nixon’s poisonous myths about Watergate took an enormous effort. The pressure on the National Archives to, in some way, enable and legitimate Trump’s own Lost Cause is likely to be even greater.

 

Trump’s documented relationship with the truth also ensures that his presidential records will necessarily be incomplete. His presidency has revealed gaping loopholes in the process of public disclosure, which the president deftly exploited. Congress should mandate that future candidates and presidents release their tax returns. Congress should also seek to tightly constrict the definition of privacy regarding presidential medical records. It should also require presidents to fully disclose their own business activities, and those of members of their immediate family, conducted while in office. Congress should also claim, as public records, the transition materials of 2016–17 and 2020–21 and those of future transitions.

 

Finally, Congress must tend to American memory. It should establish a Joint Congressional Committee to study January 6 and the events and activities leading up to it, have public hearings, and issue a report. And it should bar the naming of federal buildings, installations, and vessels after Trump; his presidency should be remembered, but not commemorated.

 

Because this, ultimately, is the point of this entire exercise. If Trump is now the worst president we have ever had, it’s up to every American to ensure that no future chief executive ever exceeds him.

"The most destructive, vile, corrupt man ever to darken America’s presidency" (Rick Wilson)

The most destructive, vile, corrupt man ever to darken America’s presidency has left the White House for the last time. 

He has disgraced himself, the office, his oath, and the nation in ways more profound and lasting than we can account. 

His incompetence, malfeasance, and evil shouldn’t be laughed off as narcissism or ignorance. 

He was surrounded by corrupt, wicked, cruel counselors and reveled in it. 

Emerson once said of Lincoln’s presidency “an institution is the lengthened shadow of a man.” He was right. 

Trump’s cruelty, division, insurrection, treason and corruption are unrivaled in history. 

He is the nadir of presidential leadership. 

He was enabled by the weak, the venal, the desperate, and the compromised. It was empowered by voices normalizing and rationalizing his evils. 

His abuse of power should come as no surprise. There are no better angels in Donald Trump’s nature. There was never a bottom. There was never any maturation, self-reflection, or a “day he became president.” It would always end this way. 

A life free of consequence, accountability, justice, or moral reckonings put a man in charge of this nation with no guiderails, no boundaries, no ethical compass. The American carnage from his inaugural address was real, and he embodied every iota of it. 

The claque of his sycophants will haunt us for a generation. They will try to clean up his philosophy and embody his authoritarianism while wearing better suits and waving credentials from an Ivy. His cult will await the second coming and his spawn will run for office.

"Trump was the worst president ever" (Max Boot)

The challenge — and the opportunity — for Joe Biden is that he succeeds the worst president in U.S. history. 

Donald Trump’s tenure was characterized by colossal incompetence and mind-numbing indifference to the public good. His coronavirus management has resulted in more than 24.1 million cases in the United States and almost 400,000 deaths — projected to exceed 500,000 deaths by May. 

While overseeing arguably the worst loss of life since the great influenza of 1918, Trump also presided over the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. He is the first president in modern history to see a net loss of jobs during his time in office. Those bare figures — catastrophic as they are — barely begin to plumb the depths of Trump’s failures, which were moral as much as managerial. 

He was the most dishonest president ever: He produced more than 30,000 documented falsehoods. AD He was the most corrupt president ever. He used his office to enrich his businesses, interfered in Justice Department investigations, engaged in obstruction of justice, stonewalled Congress, refused to release his tax returns, purged inspectors-general and pardoned his cronies and co-conspirators. 

He was the most openly racist president in modern times — arguably since Woodrow Wilson. He consistently tried to fire up his White base with bigotry against people of color. His actions too often matched his vile words — most notoriously when he ordered the children of undocumented immigrants separated from their parents. 

He was the first president who refused to accept election defeat or propagated bizarre conspiracy theories to undermine confidence in the electoral system. 

He became the only president ever impeached twice — once for trying to blackmail Ukraine into helping him politically, the second time for inciting a violent insurrection to try to stay in office. 

He leaves office with only 34 percent approval in the Gallup poll after having been the first president never to crack 50 percent support since the advent of Gallup polling. 

Because of Trump’s calamitous and costly failures, Biden will take office with hardly anyone present to watch his inauguration in a city that now has more U.S. troops than there are in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. 

Biden will lead a nation where 75 percent of Republicans do not think he was fairly elected because they have bought into the Big Lie spread by Trump and the right-wing propaganda machine, who will continue to undermine and abuse him at every turn. 

The new president will face monumental challenges that exceed those of any incoming president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. 

Not only must Biden stop a pandemic and revive an economy, but he must address global warming, income inequality, racial injustice, restore confidence in government, reinvigorate the rule of law, return ethics to government, decrease divisions in U.S. society and depoliticize government agencies. 

It’s a daunting, nearly overwhelming to-do list. But, paradoxically, by taking over at such a low point in our history, Biden is set up for success.

William Rivers Pitt:

With Washington, DC, now transformed into a perpetual nonsense machine, it was easy to miss the George W. Bush Revisionist History Tour as it slid through the shallow plastic media trench last week on rails lubricated with old tears, but there he was.

After eight years of almost complete radio silence, the former president was all over the place, yukking it up with the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel to peddle his new book and flash that folksy smirk we came to know so well. So what? Every celebrity does a book, especially former presidents, and it is noteworthy that Bush had the common decency to put some rigging tape over his mouth while President Obama was in office.

It didn't take long, though, for things to get weird. A lot of people who really should know better -- in the print, network and online news media, on social media and other forums, and in "real life" -- got all goo-goo-eyed over him. People I've known for years exclaimed over how funny and cute he was on Ellen! And how he's friends with Michelle Obama! And isn't he just so much better than Trump?

Full stop. We have just lost cabin pressure.

Let's start with the book. It is a collection of some 66 Bush-painted portraits of the faces of men and women who got blown apart one way or another in Iraq and Afghanistan. The portraits of those maimed in Iraq specifically depict soldiers in muted agony delivered to their current damaged estate by the artist formerly known as George, who threw them into that meat grinder for money on a raft of obvious lies.

If one had a soul, the act of painting the faces of your victims would seem like a fate worse than death, a sorrowful tour of self-loathing and regret as your brush rounded out the features of those laid low by your faithless greed.

But no, there was Bush on the television, smiling and smiling with the book in his lap, utterly oblivious to the ghastly irony of his endeavor.

It should come as no surprise, really. Here is the man who responded to the attacks of September 11 by demanding tax cuts, whose idea of humor was to make a satire video of himself searching for the missing weapons of mass destruction in the Oval Office. The soldiers Bush painted could very well have been getting blasted legless and eyeless out of their armored vehicles at the exact same time he was stooping to look under his desk, then under a table -- nope, not here either.

That is the George W. Bush I remember, the Bush I will never, ever forget, the feckless, lethal liar, the thief, the mass murderer, the fool, the fraud, the bumbler, the man with no shame.

How appallingly easy it is, apparently, for people to forget. Our national knack for forgetting is not solely relegated to this polished reimagining of Bush.

We are currently engaged in a great national debate over the fate of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees seeking safety here in the United States. If politicians like Donald Trump have their way, those refugees would be told in no uncertain terms that, sorry, there's no room at the inn. We just can't have you here because you might be "terrorists," even though we vigorously screen you.

See, there's this thing called the "GOP base," and they hate you because they've been well-trained to do so, and they vote. The country's current leadership needs to keep them happy, and so you are barred at the door.

In this development lies one of the greatest moral calamities the United States has ever committed, another example of highly convenient national memory loss.

To a very large degree, we created those refugees. We've been bombing Iraq with dreary regularity for 26 years and counting, bombing people's homes, their markets, their electrical grids, their mosques, their water and sewage treatment plants, their roads and bridges, and when we ran out of things to bomb, we bombed the rubble because it looks good on TV.

Sooner or later, after everything you've ever known or called home has been laid waste, you're going to grab what's left of your family and run for your lives. And run people did, millions of them, away from the American war and over the border into Syria, which was subsumed by the mass migration of these desperate victims.

Syria trembled under the burden and then collapsed into the chaos we are currently witnessing after a vicious civil war broke out, and once again, millions of people were on the run. Many ran all the way to Europe, where they await the adjudication of their fate, and many now seek asylum in the United States, where they have family and a chance at a new life.

Because we forget, they are now forgotten, and the suffering we have already visited upon them is once more compounded. It takes a special kind of monster to do such a thing to innocent people. We do it every day, and then forget it ever happened. This hellish footrace has been taking place all across the Middle East for a long while now, predominately in nations where the US has intervened militarily, most recently and vividly in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia, a staunch US ally, has been using US-made weapons to terrible effect in that nation, which is approaching Aleppo levels of carnage and devastation at speed. Perhaps the cruelest twist to all this is the insinuation, pushed by Trump whenever possible, that the ranks of these refugees will be riddled with terrorists. When all you know is annihilated, you have two simple choices: Take up arms against your aggressors, or run. These people chose to run, and even that most elemental act of ultimate surrender is not enough to evoke the slightest hint of mercy from us, the ones who put them to their heels in the first place.

This refugee crisis is an American creation, a parting gift from George W. Bush. We forget what he was, we forget the aftermath of what he did, but how? Whence comes this shallow grave of memory? The corporate "news" media, for their part, are all too happy to help us forget, because in that forgetting they are absolved of any culpability for their harrowing judgment and insatiable desire for ratings. The politicians are thrilled we forget because they want to do it all over again, because that's where the money is. In the end, however, we forget because we choose to, because horror is hard to hold in the heart for so long, because all this is our shame, too, and that is a grueling fact to face.

"Bush Counting Down Days Until He Is No Longer Worst President in History"

DALLAS (The Borowitz Report)—Former President George W. Bush is eagerly counting down the days until he is no longer the worst President in U.S. history, Bush confirmed on Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters at his home, Bush said that he “could hardly wait” until Friday, when he will be officially bounced from the worst-President slot.

“I have to admit, I never thought I’d see this day in my lifetime,” the former President said. “When you leave office with the nation in smoldering ruins, you sort of come to accept that you’re gonna be worst for a long, long time.”

“I guess you could say I set the bar kind of high, worst-wise,” he chuckled.

As the returns came in on Election Night, however, the former President suddenly realized that his days as the worst President in U.S. history might be coming to an abrupt end.

“Holy cow,” Bush remembered saying to himself. “Just holy cow.”

While Bush recognizes that many Americans are dreading Friday’s Inauguration, he said he hoped that they could “sort of understand” why he might see things differently.

“To be honest, Friday can’t come fast enough for me,” he said. “I’m like a kid waiting for Christmas.”

SATIRE, of course, but possibly true!

"Bush"-- New Biographical Book

For George W. Bush, the summer already looks unbearable. The party he gave his life to will repudiate him by nominating a bombastic serial insulter who makes the famously brash former president look like a museum docent by comparison. 

And a renowned presidential biographer is weighing in with a judgment that makes Mr. Bush’s gentleman’s Cs at Yale look like the honor roll. If Mr. Bush eventually gets a more sympathetic hearing by history, as he hopes, it will not start with Jean Edward Smith’s “Bush,” a comprehensive and compelling narrative punctuated by searing verdicts of all the places where the author thinks the 43rd president went off track. 

Mr. Smith’s indictment does not track Donald J. Trump’s, but the cumulative effect is to leave Mr. Bush with few defenders in this season of his discontent. Mr. Smith, a longtime academic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, made a name for himself in part with masterly biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant, offering historical reassessments of underrated presidents who looked better with the passage of time. 

With “Bush” he sticks to the original conventional assessment, presenting a shoot-from-the-hip Texan driven by religiosity and immune to the advice of people who knew what they were talking about. While not a fresh portrait, it is one worth debating at a time when the political class is struggling to understand the meaning of Mr. Trump’s rise. 

Mr. Trump’s name appears nowhere in “Bush,” but it is clear the populist revolt that propelled him to the verge of the Republican nomination had its roots in Mr. Bush’s presidency, so much so that he easily overcame the former president’s brother Jeb. Mr. Trump rejects much of what George W. Bush stood for, from the war in Iraq and more forgiving immigration policies to free trade and the very notion of compassionate conservatism. 

As a biographer, Mr. Smith makes no comparisons with today’s Republican leader, but he sides unmistakably with those who see Mr. Bush’s presidency in the darkest shades, if often for radically different reasons. (Mr. Smith abhors waterboarding terror suspects, for example; Mr. Trump wants it resumed.)

Mr. Smith leaves no mystery where he stands on Mr. Bush’s place in history. The first sentence of his book: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.” The last: “Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

In between are more than 650 pages of fast-paced if harsh biography. In this telling, Mr. Bush’s religious piety took on messianic fervor leading him to turn democracy promotion into a mission from God. He didn’t listen to the generals and diplomats. He badly bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. He presided over the diminution of American values by authorizing torture and bugging. 

“Believing he was the agent of God’s will, and acting with divine guidance, George W. Bush would lead the nation into two disastrous wars of aggression,” Mr. Smith writes. “Bush’s personalization of the war on terror combined with his macho assertiveness as the nation’s commander in chief,” he adds later, “were a recipe for disaster.”

GOP Convention 2012-- No Appearance or Mention of Bush

New Rules Bill Maher: GOP revisionism has erased George W. Bush, august 31 2012

UPDATE 2016: Trump's 2016 convention was also boycotted by Bush, and he was little mentioned as well.

Trump of course famously criticized GWB during his primary campaign, in part to take down Jeb Bush.

Bush's Official Portrait-- from Sears

This review is amusing.