Many liberals are certain that a Donald Trump presidency would be an unprecedented fiasco, but The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker isn’t among them. In a Sunday post, Tucker suggested that in terms of racism and overall “incompetence,” a Trump administration would be a sort of sequel to George W. Bush’s, and speculated that Republicans who are backing Hillary Clinton may be, “on a very subtle psychological level…acknowledging that [Trump] would equal, if not surpass, Dubya in his dimwittedness.”
Tucker conceded that pro-Hillary GOPers “will probably never openly admit that guilt [over having supported Bush] is eating them alive.” Nonetheless, “when they hear Trump trashing the Khan family, they remember the nasty jokes they used to tell each other back in the day about Cindy Sheehan. When they hear Trump spew racist hate, they remember how they used to avoid questions about Dick Cheney’s raw hatred of Nelson Mandela. When they hear Trump promote talk-radio sewage, they remember the days when Bush pledged allegiance to Rush Limbaugh.”
Moreover, Tucker stated, “Bush was among those who pandered to white-nationalist sentiments when he bonded with the bigots at Bob Jones University during his 2000 campaign -- the same bigots who presumably cheered as Bush turned a blind eye to the black bodies floating through the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit five years later.”
Tucker called on additional Republicans to step up and make amends:
George W. Bush was perhaps the single worst President in United States history; only a Republican who was in a coma between January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009 can deny this. Those who bore witness to Dubya’s destructiveness during those years have a moral obligation to make sure that someone as incompetent as, or even more incompetent than, the 43rd President never has the opportunity to degrade our democracy as Dubya did.
