The same was said about W. Also elected twice.
We then saw 8golden years, before the orange president.
So I would wait a bit before being able to say "good riddance, everything will be ok now, USA is saved"
Well, he certainly gave it the ol' college try—and it did take quite a while to recover from his presidency.
His point was he's an old guy. And Reagan was better than Nixon who was better than Bush junior who was better Trump ... but they all sucked and all of them were the worst thing ever to happen to America.
So yeah, Trump is the worst that has happened to America ... so far.
(and if you point out that "The American age ending" what so many people seem to want will obviously lead to democratic presidents sucking up to Putin as well ...)
With trump tho, it just seems worse. Course the only thing I have to go on is evidence and "walk like a duck-isms" but with Bush jr and before, it seemed like these guys at least appeared patrotic and they didn't look so malignantly treasonous and I think they put forth the idea that while they were conservative, at least the pretense was that they honored the office and the constitution. so since that is gone the progress toward national decline now seems to be a deliberate operation on behalf of people who are no longer interested in democracy. This is new to me.
Things would have been much worse without Barbara.
The exact same things that have been trashed by Trump while Melania doesn't seem to have any deep-seated concept of America either.
I still offer the alternate theory that Bush Sr. was indeed a pause in the GOP's descent into the current realm of evil and contempt for the population of our country. Hell, I read trump doesn't even like his own voters and that rings so true haha
I haven't been able to trust any political parties for a while.
After Obama, the GOP couldn't elevate anybody, all they could do is sink so low that only the worthless attention-getting blowhards were left standing.
I was in Texas before during and after Bush Sr was Governor, and distinctly remember the way he was not good enough for Texas before he became not good enough for America. But who is? The further back you go, a political figure is more like a normal person, usually.
The parties have always been the bad influence over the man until they got so bad that Trump made the boldest example as the party dropped the ball and let the man be an even worse influence on the party.
I watched both parties prove their incompetence in my lifetime and witnessed the outcome on a daily basis in real time. Confirmation all took place in the last part of the 20th century. Well first a warning shot from offshore when the Communist Party of Cuba proved their incompetence. Mao was an echo in the distance. Then after a number of years comes the GOP, China picks up the ball the first time, and not that many years later the Democrats. In there somewhere the Soviet Communists gave up the ghost, and where substitutes exist they're still pretty sketchy.
The Chinese Communists are incompetent as ever, that hasn't changed for the longest time, but now they look like a bastion of stability compared to the chaos other parties seek out or tolerate.
The thing in common with the shithole approach is when there's anything like a dictator no matter what they call themselves.
We may already have the hindsight needed to pinpoint the extent of the "American Century" as we knew it. Hard to drag it into the 21st century very far when the parties which built it haven't been with us for so long.
One thing nobody can deny from any party today, I've said it before and that's a big thing that makes people talk about the death of the American Age not just outside the borders or overseas but domestically. Every single day Trump comes on TV and hammers home the fact that Obama was the final President to be recognized as the "leader of the free world". And the party has packed the government with minions in lockstep who can only iterate "what's a Free World?" You can't paint a pretty picture here.
The American Age either likely paused, perhaps quite a bit before Obama, or definitely right afterward, and whether this was a near-fatal injury or a morbid conclusion, it's been quite a while and it's starting to smell too far decomposed for as many people to ignore as there were.
Chinese communists are only looking competent for the same reason every other communist looked competent (but you need to be like 50+ years old to remember what that reason is):
1) they lie
2) they're actually pretty good at preventing people from talking (even the China CCP is now threatening the families of Chinese abroad)
Chinese economic figures (which they openly "partly" falsify, openly as in the government says as much, from oil supplies to youth unemployment) now look like China ever exceeding US economic output is a tossup, 50% odds at best. And that's the falsified figures. Maybe I'm old but I remember the Soviet Union when I was a teenager and I do feel a bit like "I've seen this movie before ...". At least they managed to stay out of a shooting war, but worryingly they keep announcing they're about to start one.
> Every single day Trump comes on TV and hammers home the fact that Obama was the final President to be recognized as the "leader of the free world". And ...
The problem here is the basic assumption that US becoming the leader of the free world had anything to do with the quality of US government. That's just not what happened. I love Obama, but ... he doesn't deserve the credit there. The US became leader of the free world because the rest of the world tried to fight to the death over debt, Aryan and Japanese racial superiority and near-completely destroyed itself in a 20-year series of atrocities that were far worse in reality than even the WW2 movies show, followed by a 40 year "cold war" where communists tore themselves and anyone they touched to shreds, hundreds of millions of victims across almost all of Asia and half of Africa.
In the US, we could elect Andrew Breitbart as the next president and we'd still be nowhere near that.
And, of course, the US indeed kind of stopped being the leader of the free world, and let's see. Open war in Europe, destroying about thousand to 1500 lives per day, as well as about 100 million in economic output daily. War in the middle east, I'm not even going to count since that's been a constant for about 1500 years now. Asia has several open conflicts for the moment somewhat smaller than the Ukraine war (except in area, and total number of people affected) but Yemen and Myanmar are in open warfare right now. Africa has about a dozen open wars, most of which nobody seems to care about.
Frankly, unless this stops, is there really any doubt the US will come out ahead again? The world is getting ready to tear itself to shreds again. EVEN with the total and corrupt disaster called Trump at the helm all anyone needs to do is just stay out of the conflicts for ... perhaps the first year once they really kick off?
And are these countries trying to stop that? No, needless to say, if anything it looks like it'll intensify. The EU is now spending about half a trillion per year to get ready for war ... That's half a trillion per year NOT counting the Ukraine war AND drafting laws have been reintroduced in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Greece (if I can give anyone reading this one bit of advice: if you're male, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THOSE COUNTRIES BEFORE THOSE LAWS ARE "activated". And if you're female, at least you'll live but let's just not pretend it's going to go well for you). Japan "self-defense" spending (it's still called that) is skyrocketing, and really half of Asia is doing the same, including India. Yesterday der Spiegel said open war between Germany and Russia is "a matter of time", and as I said before China is essentially announcing a military attack on Taiwan, for now without giving a date.
Forever wars, the Patriot Act and a financial crises that took years to recover from under another president?