Who did more long-term damage to the United States and World?

[TheReckoning]

?

[John Adams]

Reagan. Not just as president either.

[darklordoftech]

Each led to the ones that followed.

[Alben Barkley]

You can at least argue Reagan was a net positive for the world, if you believe he helped bring about the end of the Cold War.

Same with Bush, due to his work in fighting AIDS in Africa.

Not so for Trump. Nothing but negative consequences for the US and the world.

[SAAuthCapitalist]

Bush Jr really sucked, but I think Obama is right up there with him. Worse, in many ways.

Biden and the corporate globalist stooges running his pathetic excuse for an admin will break records in terms of sheer embarrassment and long term damage though.

[L.D. Smith]

Bush.

I'd give Reagan the edge domestically, but Bush indisputably leads for the world.

[Big Abraham]

Trump has done the least damage of all three by far.

Reagan did more than anyone else to shift the nation rightward inaugurating a renaissance of conservatism, undoing decades of labor progress, and permanently shifting the balance of power to overseas manufacturers, in addition to the many offensive and illegal wars which he waged. He also, if anything, helped prolong the Cold War, rather than hastening its demise (which also erased the necessary balance of power between the nations).

George Bush orchestrated the ill-fated “war on terror” which has lasted to this day, massively de-stabilized the strategic Near East and consequently the whole world in pursuit of Arab oilfields (not to mention untold war crimes and an increase in Islamic militarism), and also laid the foundations for the massive overarching surveillance state that was expanded upon by Obama, and which has kept law-abiding citizens continually paranoid and even leas free than the corporate overlords had previously permitted them to be.

Trump did not challenge the Reaganite neoliberal system in any meaningful way, nor did he deviate seriously from the doctrines of the Bush administration (although he sometimes did in both cases in rhetoric), but neither has he ordained an edifice of politics, military, or economy nearly as odious and hostile to the entire world, and on that front alone, he far outranks the other two.

[Horus]

Trump to America, Bush to the world.

[I'm a John Fetterman (or Malcolm Kenyatta) Democrat]

Reagan and his legacy is the only reason the other two got elected President in the first place. That's long term damage if I've ever seen it.

[TheTide]

Trump lacked the subtlety to be ultra-damaging in a long-term sense.

[Alcibiades]

Either Reagan or Trump, definitely not Bush. It’s obviously not really possible to judge yet what the long-term effects of Trump’s presidency were, but they seem likely to include further erosion of respect for democracy and the rule of law, and greater craziness/polarisation/political dysfunction being driven by the Republican Party.

[Br progressive]

Although I classify Trump as the worst Republican president, I voted for Reagan because his administration did in fact initiate bombing campaigns and the endless wars in the Middle East that last until today, in addition to the neoliberal economy of Reagonomics, which favored the wealthy and upper middle class to the detriment of blacks and Hispanics in American domestic politics, and soon immensely influenced the neoliberal administrations of both parties afterwards, driving Democrats out of New Deal Coalition and influencing the outbreak of the 2008 global economic crisis.

[The Solace of My Labor Pains]

Reagan's the only one here who allowed the genocide of his own people, and the one who destroyed several generations' prosperity through brazen prostitution of the nation to the bloodthirsty gods of deregulation and established all of the awful foreign policy precedents that Bush and Trump followed.

[Cokeland Saxton]

Trump, and it isn’t even close

[Cassius]

Trump’s been out of office for less than one hundred days. Give it twenty years or so to see what his long term legacy is. I suspect it will prove rather ephemeral.

[gerritcole]

Ashurbanipal

[SWE]

There's a case for both Bush and Reagan but Trump is an incredibly unserious answer

[brucejoel99]

There's a case for both Bush and Reagan but Trump is an incredibly unserious answer

Hear that, y'all? It's soo "incredibly unserious" to believe that Trump potentially enabled long-term damage with his favoring of damaging right-wing policies such as the gutting of regulations for big businesses, the cutting of taxes for corporations, doing nothing for the environment, etc., in addition to being the least qualified & least deserving of the office at the outset; completely disregarding precedent, procedure, & process & greatly weakening the office in doing so; unforgivably damaging this country's political discourse; royally mishandling a deadly pandemic to the tune of 559K lives lost & counting; & - oh yeah - inciting a literal f**king insurrection upon the U.S. Capitol on the way out.

You can argue that Reagan & W.'s presidencies did more damage, but choosing to merely engage in ad-hominems instead is what's "incredibly unserious" here.

[Red Velvet]

Reagan, then Bush and then Trump.

Besides Reagan already being the obvious answer just for economic reasons, don’t forget how he dealt with the HIV epidemic as well!

That said, Bush and especially Trump are too recent to be fully certain about the problems caused in the long-term. But I would say Bush caused more damage to the World, Trump caused the most damage to the United States.

[1,066,892 Likud voters can't be wrong!]

Trump is an unserious answer because and only because he hasn't even been out of office for long enough to need a new toothbrush. I fully expect that in the longue durée his energy policies alone will be viewed more harshly than any policy of either of the other options with the possible exception of Reagan's inaction on AIDS. However, since that hasn't happened yet, Reagan is my answer.

[Ferguson97]

Trump probably wouldn't have gotten elected without Bush, so I'd say Bush for that plus the Iraq War.

[The Solace of My Labor Pains]

Trump is an unserious answer because and only because he hasn't even been out of office for long enough to need a new toothbrush. I fully expect that in the longue durée his energy policies alone will be viewed more harshly than any policy of either of the other options with the possible exception of Reagan's inaction on AIDS. However, since that hasn't happened yet, Reagan is my answer.

I've been dogpiled on in some circles for making unambiguous my stances on Reagan's AIDS policy, and there are still plenty of people who see it as a political inevitability vis-à-vis the stigma of the disease, even though his leadership is exactly what would've been needed to break through such prejudices. Similarly, I imagine that many circles in the oil emirates of the nation will still be fondly looking back on Trump's energy policy and cursing Biden's one offhand remark about divesting from oil even once ecological consequences become insurmountable, although public opinion will probably gradually keep moving in the right direction on both issues.

[Xing]

Reagan to America, Dubya to the world.

[1,066,892 Likud voters can't be wrong!]

Trump is an unserious answer because and only because he hasn't even been out of office for long enough to need a new toothbrush. I fully expect that in the longue durée his energy policies alone will be viewed more harshly than any policy of either of the other options with the possible exception of Reagan's inaction on AIDS. However, since that hasn't happened yet, Reagan is my answer.

I've been dogpiled on in some circles for making unambiguous my stances on Reagan's AIDS policy, and there are still plenty of people who see it as a political inevitability vis-à-vis the stigma of the disease, even though his leadership is exactly what would've been needed to break through such prejudices. Similarly, I imagine that many circles in the oil emirates of the nation will still be fondly looking back on Trump's energy policy and cursing Biden's one offhand remark about divesting from oil even once ecological consequences become insurmountable, although public opinion will probably gradually keep moving in the right direction on both issues.

This is going to sound much more pessimistic than my usual posting style but I'm of the opinion that ecological consequences, at least in my drought-stricken little corner of New England, are already insurmountable and have been for a few years now. The Doomsday Clock should be set at zero; the conversation should turn from preventing catastrophe to living in the aftermath of catastrophe, which is still possible and even likely (in other words, I'm not freaking out about total human extinction or whatever). Serious body blows to our post-industrial way of life are unavoidable now.

[The Solace of My Labor Pains]

Trump is an unserious answer because and only because he hasn't even been out of office for long enough to need a new toothbrush. I fully expect that in the longue durée his energy policies alone will be viewed more harshly than any policy of either of the other options with the possible exception of Reagan's inaction on AIDS. However, since that hasn't happened yet, Reagan is my answer.

I've been dogpiled on in some circles for making unambiguous my stances on Reagan's AIDS policy, and there are still plenty of people who see it as a political inevitability vis-à-vis the stigma of the disease, even though his leadership is exactly what would've been needed to break through such prejudices. Similarly, I imagine that many circles in the oil emirates of the nation will still be fondly looking back on Trump's energy policy and cursing Biden's one offhand remark about divesting from oil even once ecological consequences become insurmountable, although public opinion will probably gradually keep moving in the right direction on both issues.

This is going to sound much more pessimistic than my usual posting style but I'm of the opinion that ecological consequences, at least in my drought-stricken little corner of New England, are already insurmountable and have been for a few years now. The Doomsday Clock should be set at zero; the conversation should turn from preventing catastrophe to living in the aftermath of catastrophe, which is still possible and even likely (in other words, I'm not freaking out about total human extinction or whatever). Serious body blows to our post-industrial way of life are unavoidable now.

I fully agree, but my point in that particular phrasing was that what we've already seen still has not been quite enough for a critical mass of people to concur, or to be consistently violent enough in heavily populated and would-be informed areas to become more impossible to ignore. I think particularly of how Alaskans still care too much about their Oil Bucks™ (and Mike Dunleavy making cuts to every service under the sun for even more Oil Bucks™) to see clearly that polar regions are already the most drastically affected, and that the resulting positive feedback is only an exponential driver of further woes. This sort of discourse is what reawakened the anprim sympathies that I once dismissed as outlandish follies of an awkward youth, and my inability to at present make any personal strides towards that ideal is a bit of a persistent crisis of faith for me.