No, it’s not a joke title! He actually was right about something.
If you watched this past Saturday’s Republican primary debate, you saw Donald Trump go on the offensive against Bush–George W Bush, that is, as a line of attack against his brother, Jeb (who polls in the single digits, despite once being the establishment favorite).
Trump let loose a number of claims:
* George W Bush did not keep us safe; 9/11 happened on his watch.
* The Bush administration foolishly prosecuted two wars at once, spreading our resources too thin to achieve our objectives in either.
* Our actions destabilized the region and led to the rise of ISIS.
* The Bush administration spent a lot of time trying to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), when in fact that evidence was either extremely outdated or outright falsified.
He’s not wrong about any of those, which is perhaps why Jeb had nothing in the way of a rebuttal.
Of course, lest one think Trump has suddenly found his sense of reality, there is no indication he has stopped believing that Muslims on the other side of the Hudson River were celebrating as the World Trade Center fell (there is still no evidence this ever happened). His platform is still extremely racist, xenophobic, and hateful. His foreign policy, should he become President, would almost certainly be disastrous. I suspect he would not be able to inflict a lot of economic damage on the country–at least no worse than the other GOP candidates would cause–but I’d still prefer not to find out.
As much as I despise the man and everything he stands for, it was gratifying to see someone on a debate stage with a bunch of Republican true believers and tell them how full of shit they are in selling this myth that George W Bush “kept us safe,” and pretending that ISIS and Iraq and Afghanistan are Obama’s fault, rather than problems he inherited and attempted to manage as best he could given limited options. It’s about time the GOP got called on this ridiculous mythmaking, even if it had to come out of the mouth of someone as despicable as Trump.
Trump himself is still set to win the South Carolina primary, which will no doubt send the GOP scrambling to push someone else to the top. Rubio has collapsed; Jeb is a non-entity; Cruz is widely hated. Oddly enough, Kasich is emerging as a contender, even though he’d been largely dismissed until taking second in New Hampshire.
This primary season has been anything but boring. Let’s take a moment to remember that one time Donald Trump was the only guy on the stage who happened to be right. I can’t imagine it will happen again.
