Cruelty Isn't a Bug. It's the Brand.

There’s a running joke that every new Republican president somehow makes the last one look like a statesman. It’s the kind of dark humor you share with friends when you’re old enough to know better but still need to laugh to keep from screaming.

I think about that a lot, because back at the end of Donald Trump’s first presidential term in 2019, my high school friend, Zhubin Parang — then the head writer of The Daily Show and now a producer and writer at The Daily Show — posted a Facebook status that stopped me mid-scroll. He wrote something to the effect of: After four years of Trump, we could actually say George W. Bush was worse.

I didn’t necessarily agree with Zhubin, but I was willing to entertain the argument. You have to remember the context. Bush had eight full years in the White House, and he used them to run the country into the ditch. He sold the Iraq War on a pack of fantasies, scaring the public with talk of mushroom clouds and phantom weapons of mass destruction. That war cost hundreds of thousands of lives, destabilized the Middle East for a generation, and left the U.S. mired in blood and debt. He was the man at the helm when Hurricane Katrina hit, leaving poor and Black residents stranded in floodwaters while FEMA seemed to be waiting for divine intervention. He gave us the Patriot Act and a national security apparatus that treated privacy like an optional subscription service. Eight years of that? You can see why someone would make the case that Bush was worse. I thought about it, too. Zhubin and I are in our 40s now, and when he posted that back in 2019, it made me stop and wrestle with the idea.

But then came the years that followed. And hindsight has a way of ripping your old arguments to shreds. Because Trump’s first term was just the trailer—loud, messy, ugly, but ultimately only a preview of what was coming. His second, non-consecutive term is the sequel, and it’s like every bad Hollywood cash grab sequel: bigger explosions, more incoherent plot, and a lead actor who looks visibly older and somehow even more unhinged. Trump didn’t return to power to serve the nation or finish unfinished business. He came back to settle scores, to dodge accountability, to build himself a legal fortress out of executive power. He is not trying to govern; he is trying to survive. He is only the second president in U.S. history to serve a non-consecutive second term, the first since Grover Cleveland pulled it off in the 19th century.

https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/cruelty-isnt-a-bug-its-the-brand l