George W. Bush distinguished between good and evil in no uncertain terms, and urged Americans to do good.
On the evening of the 9/11 attacks, Bush said, “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world,” according to CNN.
In his first State of the Union address, Bush said, “states like (North Korea, Iran and Iraq), and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” according to the White House.
Later in the address, Bush said, “In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self.”
While Bush’s rigid moral prescriptions often did violence to facts, most notably when nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and tenuous connections between Sad- dam Hussein and Al-Qaeda launched a multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq, his clear division between good and evil and accompanying assertion of a collective responsibility to do good are notably absent in the current president.
When Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly told Donald Trump Vladimir Putin was a killer, Trump responded, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?” Bush did not have such muddled ethics as to conflate Russia, where journalists and dissidents are routinely poisoned, with the United States’ flawed but considerably less murderous political culture.
Where Bush called on ordinary citizens to build a culture of responsibility and serve goals larger than self, Trump proclaimed “I alone can fix it,” at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Instead of a civic duty to do good, Trump professed a personal mission to win more.
When the Islamic State is defeated, Trump will claim as his own a victory that in reality belongs to neither him nor American Special Forces nor President Obama nor any individual actor. Kurdish Peshmerga troops, the Iraqi National Army, European intelligence and countless others will have played a role in eliminating the Islamic State. But what Bush would have called good defeating evil, Trump will tally as a personal triumph.
Where Bush saw good and evil, Donald Trump sees winners and losers. Where Bush saw an urgent need for Americans to do good, Trump sees a need to put America first in a nihilistic, zero-sum world.
The Bush administration and the Trump administration do show some overlap in their willingness to present provable falsehoods to the American people. But even here, Bush lied in service of American exceptionalism, Iraqi freedom and loftier ideals than, for example, how many people showed up to his inauguration or how many electoral college votes he received.
To be clear, Bush repeatedly acted deeply unethically, and does not present a model of effective leadership. But in the face of Trump’s self-obsession and ethical incoherence, I can’t help but miss Bush’s moral clarity.
Danny Bugingo can be reached at [email protected]