It is 2040. Coronavirus is a distant memory. Boris Johnson has fathered his 19th child. Toy Story 12 and Fast & Furious 32 are playing in cinemas. Donald Trump is a cuddly nonagenarian who is cooed over by liberals. “Remember the good old days when Donny joked about injecting bleach?” people will reminisce fondly. “What a legend!”
Does that last prediction sound improbable? It shouldn’t: just look at the ongoing rehabilitation of George W Bush. It is only 11 years since Bush left office, but widespread amnesia regarding his regressive record appears to have set in. People have already giggled over his adorable struggle to put on a poncho during Trump’s inauguration and praised his unlikely friendship with Ellen DeGeneres. Now many liberals are fawning over Bush for the incredible achievement of being an iota more sane than Trump.
On Saturday, Bush put out a video calling for compassion and national unity during the coronavirus crisis. In it, he declared: “We are not partisan combatants; we are human beings.” This is a lovely message; really, it is. It is just a shame he wasn’t so invested in our shared humanity when he used the fabricated threat of weapons of mass destruction to bomb Iraq into oblivion. It is a pity he didn’t think about “how small our differences are” when he fought LGBTQ+ rights. It is unfortunate he wasn’t so concerned about compassion during his botched and heartless response to Hurricane Katrina.
If there were an Oscar for best use of cinematography to whitewash a bloody legacy, then Dubya has certainly earned it. His three-minute message – which was part of The Call to Unite, a project featuring videos from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Julia Roberts – has been viewed more than 6m times and generated widespread praise. With Trump in office, suddenly Bush doesn’t seem so bad to many observers. At least Bush could reach across the political aisle now and again. “Bush handled post-Katrina by asking his father and Bill Clinton to help,” tweeted Maggie Haberman, the New York Times’ White House correspondent. “The current president has been uninterested in asking his predecessors to get involved as the country deals with Covid.”
We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to normalise Bush or rewrite his record just because Trump is unleashing his own campaign of shock and awfulness. We don’t have to minimise the enormous damage Bush did just because he didn’t tweet misspelled abuse at his political enemies. We don’t have to do any of this – but a lot of Americans seem desperately to want to. This is partly because the US has a deep-seated reverence for its heads of state, as illustrated by the fact they retain the honorific of president after they have left office. Perhaps because Britain is a monarchy with a longer history than the US, we don’t see our head of government as a national mother or father figure in quite the same way.
However, the bigger motivation behind the apparent desire to rehabilitate Bush is probably a desperation among liberals to see Trump as an anomaly who doesn’t reflect the “real” US. But Trump is not an aberration. He didn’t emerge from a vacuum. The lies, jingoism and anti-intellectualism of the Bush era helped pave the way for him – and the steady rehabilitation of Bush is paving the way for Trump to evade accountability in the future.
You don’t move forward by forgetting and forgiving the past; you move forward by learning from it. It seems we haven’t learned anything. Nevertheless, my greatest respect goes out to Bush’s PR people for their incredible work transforming him into a national treasure. Mission accomplished.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
