There are plenty of people who like to draw comparisons between our two worst presidents in history, Donald Trump and George W. Bush, and often the similarities can be striking. But there are three things that the two men have in common that made them terrible presidents almost more than anything else.
Both men understood very little about the presidency either before or during their time in office. Both men had (have) an insatiable need to sound “tough” — on crime, on terror, on drugs, no matter what the issue. And both men had the same uncanny knack for taking vacations, especially at the most inappropriate times. Here’s Bush demonstrating all three at once:
But even that video clip seems impossibly dated and hilariously naïve when it comes to how morally bankrupt, hopelessly inept, and desperately out of touch Donald Trump himself is. Today as he addressed reporters in the White House Rose Garden — part of his declaration of a national emergency in order to steal money from disaster relief efforts and the military to fund his racist border wall, which he just made official — Trump even did a brief, racist impression of Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which he voiced both himself and President Xi, asking “Why don’t you have a drug problem in your country” and answering “we give death penalty” in the same monotone, broken English impression we used to reserve for Native Americans in terrible western films.
What does Trump have in common with that video, though? He just spent nearly an hour talking about how terrible immigrants and crime at the border and gang violence and drug smuggling are in order to convince America that there actually is a national emergency that must be tended to.
Then he’s going golfing:
Here’s Trump’s public schedule for tomorrow. (Public schedules don’t include all of a president’s activities.) pic.twitter.com/9t4LY7XBrN
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 15, 2019
Now watch him drive (up the national debt even further than Bush did).
Featured image via screen capture
