Yet none of that counted in the liberal political and media establishment, which, despite the clear preference of the electorate, spent this president’s two terms issuing smears against his character, his intelligence, and, indeed, his validity as a presidential officeholder. They called him a fool, a liar, a warmonger, a war criminal, and an all-around not-very-bright fellow. They said he did not really win his first election. He was, for them, something like the apocalypse in pants.

They say that Donald Trump is worse than any other president in history, but tell that to W. To a generation that knows only Trump as the focal point of left-wing detestation, the widespread hatred of Bush may seem improbable, if not impossible. Even those of us who lived through the Bush administration have to squint just to remember the breadth and depth of the animosity directed toward him. To a degree that has been forgotten, overlooked, or conveniently skipped over, the Left attempted to discredit, dishonor, and demean Bush using much the same playbook later deployed against Trump: Namely, that he was singularly unfit and uniquely dangerous. True, during the Bush years, the Left lacked the advantages of social media, “woke” culture, and a fully fractured electorate, but its vitriol against the 43rd president was, during his eight years in office and for some time thereafter, nearly ubiquitous. Remembering the nuances of the cultural reaction to Bush is a lesson in the Left’s inability to gauge properly the degree of alleged awfulness of assorted Republican presidents or presidential aspirants. 

Perhaps the key document from this era in American life was a book titled Bushisms, which, pocket-size paperback though it was, encapsulated the central argument against Bush: that the president was mentally deficient and verbally incoherent and that his misstatements were so egregious that they deserved to be collected in book form. The first volume of Bushisms — there were multiple subsequent collections — was published in 2001, just the first year of Bush’s presidency, which suggests that the fix was in: Even before Bush had had an opportunity to govern, the media had decided he was a buffoon. “Collecting these utterances by our now president over the past year and a bit, I’ve found myself returning time and again to the same question: What exactly is wrong with this guy?” wrote Jacob Weisberg, the editor and general impresario of Bushisms, in the original book. 

What were Bush’s sins? Among the Bush sayings quoted throughout the various volumes of Bushisms were what would now be considered Tim Walz-ian knucklehead-dom. “I think — tide turning — see, as I remember — I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of — it’s easy to see a tide turn — did I say those words?” There were self-contradicting assertions: “There’s no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead”). And comments meant to be gravely self-revealing: “You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” Plus, there were hapless redundancies: “Our nation must come together to unite.” 

Bush was an inelegant speaker, though a sincere one. And, because they were listening to a person and not correcting a grammar quiz, Bush voters, to borrow a phrase that would only be coined later, took him seriously, not literally. The fun the chattering classes had at the expense of Bush’s command of the language, meanwhile, revealed the source of their opposition to be at least partly a manifestation of snobbishness. Although he was the Yale-educated offspring of a former vice president and president, Bush was regarded as a refugee from West Texas who was associated with the unsavory oil industry. His freely expressed Christian faith and his status as a one-time drinker who now abstained did not help him among the cognoscenti.

Such was their certainty that Bush was unworthy of the White House that certain celebrities, or “celebrities,” pledged to terminate their residency in the United States if he won in 2000, including movie director Robert Altman, rocker Eddie Vedder, and former JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger. This was a step beyond merely opposing a candidate. Implicit in the threat to become an expatriate upon that candidate’s election is the notion not merely that the country will suffer but will become dangerous, wicked, and uninhabitable.  

Bush offended the best and the brightest. When he reached the White House in 2000, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau opted to render Bush in the form of an asterisk to denote the irregular nature of his win following the admittedly strange Florida recount process. This attitude changed very little even after 9/11. Norman Mailer sneeringly wrote in the New York Review of Books that Bush had missed his calling as a “world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph),” while Susan Sontag, in a decree penned immediately after in the New Yorker, glumly reflected, “We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall.” Years later, speaking with Douglas Brinkley in Rolling Stone, Kurt Vonnegut ranted and raved about diminishing petroleum reserves before finally admitting that he preferred even Richard Nixon to Bush. “Bush is so ignorant,” Vonnegut said back then. “And I don’t like idiotic, impulsive people. He’s not a capable human being.” 

But bashing Bush was not simply restricted to tony publications. Over the years, Comedy Central aired not one but two sitcoms on the then-sitting president, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s live-action That’s My Bush! and the animated Lil’ Bush. Even junky sci-fi movies sought gravitas by piling on. In the 2005 Star Wars prequel Revenge of the Sith, Natalie Portman’s Padme Amidala was given a line widely perceived as a metaphor for our nation under Bush: “So this is how liberty dies — with thunderous applause.” This was not wickedly clever cultural commentary but the symptom of a fixation. The less said about the noxious 2006 assassination-themed art-house “mockumentary” Death of a President, the better. 

Meanwhile, the documentary film industry was rejuvenated entirely on the strength of the Bush and Bush-adjacent panic: These were the years of Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), and An Inconvenient Truth (2006) — the latter not about Bush but certainly made with Bush in mind given the fact that it was written by and starring Al Gore, the man who lost (or, for this audience base, won?) the 2000 election. Michael Moore commandeered the still-widely viewed Academy Awards to denounce the Iraq War: “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” the well-padded auteur hollered. 

For years and years, Hollywood assumed that its anti-Bush sentiment was widely shared among the general public. How else to account for the cottage industry of Bush-centric feature films? Sadly, because of the cumbersome production schedules of major motion pictures, many of the marquee Bush movies emerged toward the end of, or even many years after, the conclusion of the president’s time in office: 2008 saw the release of both Oliver Stone’s biopic W. and the TV movie Recount, the latter a rather late-in-the-game look back at the 2000 Florida vote recount with Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain. And it was not until the Obama administration that Hollywood gave moviegoers what they thought they had been clamoring for: a biopic of Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, the laughably self-serious Fair Game (2010), starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. Most painfully of all, Christian Bale had to wait until 2018 to star as Dick Cheney in the instantly passé biopic Vice — apparently, no one at the studio had anticipated that the Cheney name would be rehabilitated on the Left thanks to his daughter Liz. 

Invective, parody, and plain old bad press directed at public officials are signs of a functioning democracy, but the sort of obsessive hysteria the Left exhibited during the Bush years was an ominous precursor of our present political moment. We hear that the electorate has reached a state of exhaustion, but it seems likelier that it is members of the professional liberal establishment that are tuckered out after a quarter-century of unmitigated panic over whichever Republican happens to be in the Oval Office. 

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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.