A Model of a Basically Competent Republican President

[Lorizael]

Trump is an incurious, ignorant blowhard. W was a simpleminded chimp. These are the two Republican presidents I have direct knowledge of. Yeah, I was alive for both Reagan and Bush Sr., but I was too young to really have any awareness or knowledge of them. So when I look at my assessment of these presidents and take note of my general political lean (crazy, yes, but left-ish), my spidey sense tingles. That is, it feels like confirmation bias.

So I wish I had a model of a basically competent Republican president I could point to and say, "Look, that guy is not on the same side of the political spectrum as you, but he appears to at least have all his marbles. Trump and W, on the other hand, are nincompoops. There's a difference and you're not hopelessly biased!" And I am aware that there are relatively recent Republican presidents (Bush Sr.? Ford? Eisenhower?) who are generally regarded as sane and with it, but I have no firsthand knowledge of them. So I can't be sure that were I transplanted to their respective eras, I wouldn't have thought they were blithering morons.

So, older folks with more direct awareness of past Republican presidents, were there basically decent ones who make our two most recent Rs seem anomalously awful? Or is it the nature of politics to be hopelessly biased and incapable of seeing the opposition as anything other than screamingly idiotic? (I'll note that I suspect both McCain and Romney would have been reasonably okay presidents (even though I voted for neither of them), but I can't actually know how I would have felt had they won.)

I used "so" a lot in this post. Sigh, I'm tired.

[Kidlicious]

Trump is right now. All of the current candidates are competing on the basis of supporting Trump. It wasn't like that for the last 2 R presidents. In future elections candidates will claim to be Trump Rs just as they used to claim to be Reagan Rs. Most were not.

[Broken_Erika]

A real "Competent" president would be Homer Simpson or Peter Griffon!
Or just go with Cthulu if you want a competent Republican President .

[Proteus_MST]

A real "Competent" president would be Homer Simpson or Peter Griffon!
Or just go with Cthulu if you want a competent Republican President .

All 3 definitely better republican presidents than Trump.
Especially Cthulhu ... he doesn't claim to be the biggest and baddest ... he just is

[Kidlicious]

[Broken_Erika]

#NoLivesMatter!

[Garth Vader]

Bush Sr, was a fine model for you. Even as a lefty you would still have respect for him as a president.

[rah]

Ike

[Lorizael]

Did you like him?

[Dinner]

Bush Sr was the last competent and noncorrupt Republican President we had. Bush Jr would certainly sell policy to the highest bidder but at least was ethical enough not to make personal financial advantage of his office. Reagan was not corrupt just deeply immoral repealing the fairness doctrine and adding in setting up a right wing alternative reality propaganda network which has so harmed and polarized our nation. Let us not forget how Reagan conspired with Iranian terrorists to encourage them to keep American hostages imprisoned as Reagan knew doing so would help his election chances, how he then repaid those same sanctioned Iranian terrorists by illegally giving them weapons, or how he paid for it all by moving drugs grown by central American military dictatorships to the US transported aboard US Military planes. Reagan was a complete immoral and criminal piece of ****.

[rah]

. Let us not forget how Reagan conspired with Iranian terrorists to encourage them to keep American hostages imprisoned as Reagan knew doing so would help his election chances,

you give him way too much credit.

[Elok]

It should be borne in mind that Trump really is exceptional, in that he appears to approach the theoretical limit of incompetence. That is, it is difficult to imagine a president being significantly less effective than Trump, because a year and a half into his presidency I'm struggling to think of anything he's actually done, or even attempted, except that one tax cut, the contested travel ban, and a bunch of inflammatory tweets. Unless you define competent presidential performance as doing literally nothing, he is about as incompetent as a president can get. He's also atypical in a variety of other ways, so you're working with one fairly standard data point and one case where the god of arbitrary fate decided to incarnate as a cat and barf a hairball on your graph.

Trump's transcendent incompetence does have the interesting implication that, at a certain point, less competence is actually desirable in a president. If Trump had more motivation and ability to do his job, he could do some pretty horrible things.

[Uncle Sparky]

I suspect that if Trump shows up at the G7 in Canada, as he's threatened to do, the other world leaders will greet him as a new Caesar... and all say, "He tripped and fell."
The world has also learned a lot from our Russian friends...

[Kidlicious]

It should be borne in mind that Trump really is exceptional, in that he appears to approach the theoretical limit of incompetence. That is, it is difficult to imagine a president being significantly less effective than Trump, because a year and a half into his presidency I'm struggling to think of anything he's actually done, or even attempted, except that one tax cut, the contested travel ban, and a bunch of inflammatory tweets. Unless you define competent presidential performance as doing literally nothing, he is about as incompetent as a president can get. He's also atypical in a variety of other ways, so you're working with one fairly standard data point and one case where the god of arbitrary fate decided to incarnate as a cat and barf a hairball on your graph.

Trump's transcendent incompetence does have the interesting implication that, at a certain point, less competence is actually desirable in a president. If Trump had more motivation and ability to do his job, he could do some pretty horrible things.

You're dead wrong. Judge his competence by comparing what he said he would do and what he has done so far. I really don't know what other standard you would use or what standard you did use.

These are his promises made and his promises kept so far.

1) Decrease regulation
2) Cut Taxes
3) Rebuild the military
4) Decrease the national debt
5) Appoint conservative judges
6) Get us out of bad international deals.
7) Reverse Obama's horrible foreign policy.
8) Decrease illegal immigration.

Promises not kept yet

1) Build the wall
2) Repeal and replace Obama care
3) Rebuild infrastructure
4) Drain the Swamp

[Aeson]

#4