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How George W. Bush Made It Possible for Donald Trump To Wreck the GOP

How George W. Bush Made It Possible for Donald Trump To Wreck the GOP

If the 2016 GOP primary is a long meltdown, Saturday night was when the core breached and the damage became catastrophic.

Sure, the damage that Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric about Mexicans, Muslims, the disabled, women, and anyone who doesn’t call him a genius was probably already irreversible. But in that two-hour debate, the billion-dollar baby found the cracks in the Republican coalition and began fracking away.

“I will tell you. They lied,” said Trump when asked about George W. Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War, as Jeb Bush stood a few feet away. “And they said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

This was like Code Pink in full anti-war fury, calling out a Bush brother to his face. Trump also praised Planned Parenthood, noting that abortions are only a tiny fraction of what it does, and rebuking Ted Cruz: “You are the single biggest liar, you’re probably worse than Jeb Bush.”

Then he mentioned the one indisputable fact you’re never, ever supposed to point out as a Republican: George W. Bush was president on 9/11.

The only way he could go any further would be to actually throw a shoe at a Bush.

The crowd booed him several times but the online poll at the Drudge Report — the sewer into which all that is conservative online drains and flows — showed this:

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“If [his debate performance] doesn’t backfire, then it will be official; nothing can stop him,” GOP strategist Curt Anderson said.

Um. Yeah.

The tribalism of the GOP — along with massive support from vested donors who depend on Republicans to make the richest ever richer — has kept the party together despite its undeniable failures. Trump is proving he can stomp on half the tribe and still win, violating the rule that you’re never supposed to mention Bush failures where you eat.

Republicans are finally figuring out that their party isn’t their party. Decades of identity politics built on resentment and loss have created a moveable beast ready to follow anyone fearless enough to savage their opponents and promise a restoration of lost status.

George W. Bush is a victim of this mob mentality because Jeb is calling on his brother for backup. But more than any living Republican, W. — or the machine around W. — figured out how to channel identity politics into political power.

One fortunate son paved the way for another.

Trumpism is all about braggadocio and the use of power for its own sake. W. Bushism proceeded with the same mentality, while adhering to the pre-Trump etiquette of only hinting his true intentions with heavily coded language.

With a veneer of respectability and a pseudo-aristocratic pedigree, Bush definitely differed from Trump in style. He wasn’t willing to swing wildly in public and he had an innate sense of legacy that drove him to woo the fastest growing group of new voters, Latinos, rather than using them as scapegoats for America’s ills.

Instead, Bush’s policies did the wild swinging for him — and the damage he did to America and the Republican Party is finally becoming clear with the emergence of Donald Trump.

Trump seems ahistorical with his disconnection from reality and his willingness to invent facts that serve his narrative, of an America in decline that only he can save. But his closest antecedent is the Bush/Cheney administration

From his campaign built on lying about who would benefit most from his tax cuts to claiming a mandate from an election he lost to passing those surplus-draining tax cuts, Bush’s willingness to ignore precedent and reality was evident long before the Iraq War.

While Bush deserves credit for visiting a mosque and calling for tolerance in the days after 9/11, his administration’s relentless drive for war in Iraq was only possible by exploiting America’s worst fears, creating a culture of endless war that has seen us bomb more than a half dozen Muslim countries since 2001.

With Republicans finally debating whether the Iraq War was an act of outright deception or just complete incompetence, the idea that the facts can be trimmed to fit a presidential agenda wasn’t just politics as usual for the Bush Administration. It was the result a philosophy that embraced the art of intentional deception — a right-wing response to a world without a countervailing superpower.

‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” a Bush aide later identified as Karl Rove told author Ron Suskind. “And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

For decades, the right has been building what historian Rick Perlstein calls “The Long Con.” But only during the Bush era did that confidence game become apocalyptic — just as the national unity that followed 9/11 was charred by the insanity of the Iraq War.

While most of America sees the Bush Administration as a failure, the party’s biggest donors experienced its massive transfer of the wealth and its regulatory elimination (which sped climate change and ushered in the Great Recession) as tremendous spoils of victory.

After decades of right-wing conspiring to create a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the high bench delivered Citizens United and the decimation of nearly all campaign finance laws. That decision encouraged Republican billionaires to step in and create their own shadow party. The party establishment was left powerless in the face of an actual billionaire donor stepping into the fray, ready to burn everything down — whenever it might suit his fancy.

From the increasing abandonment of reality during the Bush era, a straight line can be drawn to the complete denial of climate science, the absolute abandonment of normal political order to obstruct Barack Obama, and now, the rise of Trump.

The party has actively shrugged off the constraints of reality in the name of power. And today they confront a skillful, reckless interloper who is even better at that than they are.

It’s Not Too Soon To Judge George W. Bush’s Presidency On Key Issues

It’s Not Too Soon To Judge George W. Bush’s Presidency On Key Issues

By James Mann, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

In the six years since he left the White House, President George W. Bush has often claimed that it is too early for historical judgments about his presidency. “It’s too soon to say how many of my decisions will turn out,” he wrote in Decision Points, his presidential memoir.

In this, Bush was indulging in what we will call the Truman Consolation. President Harry S. Truman was deeply unpopular during most of his time in the White House and in the years immediately afterward. Only decades later did historians begin to rate his presidency highly for the actions he took in the early years of the Cold War. At one time or another, when their poll ratings are slumping and their media coverage is biting, most modern American presidents like to believe they will eventually be vindicated, just as Truman was.

But Bush is largely wrong: In some of the most important areas of his presidency, it’s not too soon to draw conclusions. Just by judging against Bush’s own forecasts, some of the most far-reaching and important initiatives of his presidency didn’t work — or turned out poorly.

At the top of the list is the war in Iraq. Bush and his advisors badly misjudged what it would entail. They overestimated the international support the United States would be able to obtain for military action. They asserted before the war that American troops would need to stay in Iraq for no more than a couple of years. The administration’s public estimate before the war was that it would cost less than $100 billion; instead, it cost $2 trillion.

Intended originally as a short-term demonstration of American power and influence, the Iraq war over the longer term brought about the opposite. In its unhappy aftermath, Americans became increasingly cautious, more reluctant to become involved overseas. Overall, the war will go down as a strategic blunder of epic proportions, among the most serious in American history.

A similar fate will befall the second-most far-reaching aspect of Bush’s legacy, his historic tax cuts. Bush argued that they would stimulate the economy and spur economic growth. The short-term benefits proved dubious at best, but the harmful long-term consequences were incalculable, both for the federal government and, more importantly, for American society.

When Bush took office, America was in a brief period of budgetary surplus. There was actually a debate, forgotten and almost unimaginable today, about how to use the surplus: Pay down the debt? Launch new federal initiatives? Bush chose to cut taxes, and then did so in ways (tax cuts on dividends and capital gains) that proved immensely beneficial to the wealthiest Americans.

It’s true that President Barack Obama eventually allowed the Bush cuts on upper-income Americans to expire. But the damage had been done. Over the course of nearly a decade, the federal government became increasingly short of funds, while wealthy Americans built up greater and greater assets. Whenever you use a road, bridge or airport that needs repairs (or read a news story about the Pentagon complaining about budget constraints), you might pause to think about the Bush tax cuts and the role they played in shaping the America we see today.

Bush’s second round of tax cuts, in 2003, were historic in another sense. By then, he had already dispatched American troops to Iraq. In every previous military conflict since the Civil War, American presidents had raised taxes to help defray the costs. Bush bucked this historical trend: He lowered them.

It’s true that in a few other policy areas judgments of Bush’s presidency may improve over the years as events unfold and as more information comes to light.

The primary example could be counter-terrorism. The Senate’s recent report on enhanced interrogation techniques makes current judgments on that dark era even harsher than they would have been otherwise. Torture is torture, and no passage of time will change the moral judgments on that.

On the other hand, in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, some Europeans began to ask why the attackers had not been kept under greater surveillance. If such terrorist attacks were to continue over many years, then judgments on the Bush-era surveillance programs might eventually come to be less harsh than they are today. Or they may come to be seen as the true beginning of a new surveillance state. More time needs to pass before historical judgments on this issue can take shape.

Overall, Bush’s presidency is likely to be remembered for his lack of caution and restraint. Once, in the midst of a discussion with his military advisors, Bush made a telling observation: “Someone has got to be risk-averse in this process, and it better be you, because I’m not.”

George W. Bush was certainly not risk-averse. He took gambles both in foreign policy and with the economy. Sometimes they paid off. Yet overall, the country paid heavily for the risks he took. History isn’t likely to revise that judgment.

James Mann, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent, is a fellow in residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His latest book, George W. Bush, is a volume in the American Presidents Series of biographies. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Exclusive: Anti-Tax Crusader Speaks Out Against Default “Experiment”

As president of Americans for Tax Reform, the right-wing activist and lobbyist Grover Norquist defers to nobody in his zeal to slash government spending and cut taxes, no matter the consequences. His organization’s famed “anti-tax pledge” bears the signature of nearly every Republican member of Congress — and all of them evidently fear that he would denounce them for violating its stringent terms.

Yet as the White House, Senate and House leaders struggle to reach agreement on spending and taxes before the August 2 debt limit doomsday, even Norquist appeared to waver — suggesting to the Washington Post editorial board on Tuesday that he wouldn’t attack Congress for letting the Bush tax cuts expire, before following up with strong statement Thursday indicating the opposite.

If Norquist is flipping and flopping, the reason is simple. Unlike the Tea Party Republicans, but much like his supporters in the business community, he is troubled by the potential consequences of an impending and unprecedented default. As Norquist told The National Memo today in an interview:

“I am not an advocate or adherent of the position I have heard some state, that a default would be ‘not a big deal’ or ‘would strengthen the hand of those arguing for limited government.’ I worry that handing the executive branch control over what bills to pay is not a wise move….even when they would have less cash to spend.”

Norquist went on to say that “a ‘shutdown’ or ‘default’ or ‘wobbly walk around the rim of default’ would be, as my mother would say, ‘unhelpful.’ How unhelpful? I don’t know, [and I’m] not real interested in finding out. Let’s experiment on a smaller country.”

Leaving aside his trademark flippancy, Norquist’s concern that a default “experiment” might go badly wrong puts him in direct conflict with Tea Party Republicans — such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), now a leading presidential contender — who insist they won’t vote to raise the debt limit and don’t fear the consequences. Clearly, he is concerned by the consequences, as are many business leaders at companies that have donated heavily to Americans for Tax Reform.

At the same time that Norquist acknowledges the dangers of default, he bristles at the notion of tolerating any tax increase on anybody as part of a debt limit deal. He sounds as if he means to hold House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the pledge, even as reports of their negotiations with the White House claim that the Republican leaders are considering a deal that would include revenue increases.

“I support Boehner and McConnell’s stated positions that they want significant, real, enforceable spending restraint and no tax hike in return for a hike in the debt ceiling,” said Norquist. “They are willing to compromise on the size of the spending restraint. Not on the tax hike.” He obliquely warned both leaders that “it is key for the GOP not to be seen putting their fingerprints on a tax hike or phony spending cuts. That would make it difficult to go to unaffiliated voters in 2012 and argue that [Republicans] are the antidote to Obama spending.”

But there is a contradiction in Norquist’s position as well as the positions taken by Boehner and McConnell — if only President Obama were willing to draw it out rather than surrender to his opponents, as news reports suggest he is now preparing to do. Anyone who regards default as perilous to the nation’s economic health and safety, including even the most anti-tax conservatives, should be willing to reach an honest compromise with Democrats to avert that fate.

In a poker game, Norquist’s admission that he worries about default would be considered a “tell” — the involuntary signal of a bluff. Neither he nor the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill want to take the country over the default cliff. But the president doesn’t seem to be able to see past all the huffing and bluffing.

Watch The National Memo’s Editor-in-Chief Discuss The Piece On MSNBC’s Morning Joe On Friday

Republican Tax King Frees Lawmakers To Let Bush Tax Cuts Expire

Grover Norquist, whose conservative watchdog group Americans for Tax Reform has convinced basically every Republican running for Congress over the last decade to sign a never-raise-any-taxes pledge, told The Washington Post‘s editorial board that, to their (and, I think, the world’s) astonishment, that GOP congressmen who vote to let some or all Bush tax cuts expire would not be in violation of their sacred oath:

With a handful of exceptions, every Republican member of Congress has signed a pledge against increasing taxes. Would allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled in 2012 violate this vow? We posed this question to Grover Norquist, its author and enforcer, and his answer was both surprising and encouraging: No.

In other words, according to Mr. Norquist’s interpretation of the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, lawmakers have the technical leeway to bring in as much as $4 trillion in new tax revenue — the cost of extending President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for another decade — without being accused of breaking their promise. “Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase,” Mr. Norquist told us. So it doesn’t violate the pledge? “We wouldn’t hold it that way,” he said.

Epic news. This makes a deal on the debt ceiling much more plausible, and should cheer progressives who want to see the biggest, most regressive tax cut in U.S. history–and by far the greatest driver of the deficit–fall by the wayside.