If you were an adult 25 years ago, politically aware, and a Democrat, you remember the horror of watching George W. Bush win the presidency without winning the popular vote. I remember being up into the wee hours of the morning on election night in 2000, astonished and beleaguered that Bush was being anointed the projected winner of the presidential election against Al Gore.
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I can picture many of my contemporaries reading this and shaking their heads in firm affirmation. It was like watching a bomb of ineptitude go off over our country.
The country ended up being on pins and needles until the Supreme Court settled the Florida recount in Bush’s favor. I know for a fact that I held so much hope in the Court doing the right thing, and, of course, it didn’t. And I can also say I watched with tears in my eyes as Gore graciously conceded the election.
Bush was sworn in on January 20, 2001 and, for people like me, it was distressing. How did this guy, untested, incurious and unknowledgeable about the world — and thin on experience — end up as President of the United States?
I wasn’t alone in feeling that dread. From election night on, a lot of people I knew lived with a fairly high level of anxiety that something bad would happen on his watch, precisely because he seemed so unprepared for the job. And our adversaries were surely aware of his shortcomings.
Then something bad happened. Something horrific. I’ve lived in New York City for 33 years, and I watched the Twin Towers burn from my rooftop. In the middle of that horror, a second fear set in: How on earth was George W. Bush going to lead this country through the worst terrorist attack in its history?
The worry that had started as skepticism about an election suddenly became something much more visceral and alarming. Is this man capable of leading us through this catastrophic episode?
And then, to my genuine surprise, Bush rose to the occasion. Standing in the wreckage of Ground Zero, he told the country that the people responsible would hear from us. He struck the right tone: calm, resolute, human, in a way that steadied a shaken country and made the promise of justice feel credible.
For someone who had no faith whatsoever in his leadership going in, it was startling to watch him find his footing. In those first weeks, he looked like a commander-in-chief. I remember him throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium for Game three of the 2001 World Series. He threw a strike, not the ceremonial lobs most public figures toss.
As a baseball fan, I noticed. It felt like a small, strange metaphor for a president who was, for that moment, hitting the mark.
Of course, it didn’t last. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons steered the administration toward a stupefying war in Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11, and Bush foolishly went along with it.
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What followed was one failure after another: a war built on pretenses, the infamous and woefully premature “Mission Accomplished” banner unfurled on an aircraft carrier years before anything resembling accomplishment, and Bush arriving on that carrier in a fighter jet. It sounds like something stupid Trump would do, except for the fact that Trump would never be able to fit in the cockpit seat.
That Iraq conflict dragged on with no real resolution, and Bush bears the responsibility for that decision and its cost. His presidency ended with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By any measure, it was a presidency that crashed with missions unaccomplished.
So it says something that, 25 years after 9/11, I find myself missing George W. Bush, not because his presidency was good, but because Donald Trump doesn’t come close to how Bush handled that specific, singular moment. The fear I had with Bush now pales in comparison to the fear I have with the lunatic Donald Trump at the helm.
First, and most insultingly, Trump this week repeated a fabrication he has spent years building — his own account of where he was and what he did on September 11th, which is galling on its own. This is not the date for fanciful fairy tales and, more bluntly, lies. Bush never had any reason to lie about what he did, because what he did mattered.
Back to that fear. On every single front, from Trump’s handling of intelligence, his treatment of longtime allies, the chaos inside the Defense Department, and his eagerness to court adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, to the needless Iran war, and on and on and on, Trump is 100 times more dangerous than Bush ever was.
If this country were attacked the way it was on 9/11, Trump’s unhinged temperament and lack of discipline would prevent him from responding in the measured way Bush did. We got a preview during COVID, which he mismanaged and mangled badly.
And his behavior since, including last weekend’s wild and incessant social-media tirades that read as unmoored from reality as humanly possible, is not the picture of someone who could stand at a podium in a moment of national trauma and steady the country.
My God, if you stop to think about what Trump would do if another 9/11 occurred in this country, well, I shudder violently at the thought.
Yes, sure, hindsight makes it easy to see that Bush, for all his failures before and after, was the right man for that one specific moment. Twenty-five years later, it’s just as clear that Trump is, without a doubt or question, the wrong man for a moment like it, should one ever come again, God forbid.
I definitely do not harbor nostalgia for a Bush presidency I never supported and that ultimately failed. But I do have the certainty that if a crisis on the scale of 9/11 hit today, there’d be no Ground Zero moment of steadiness amidst all the ruin and rubble and destruction.
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There would just be the ruin and rubble of a destructive Trump.
