Six months into another catastrophic GOP Middle East War

Michael Tomasky has a piece highlighting that the economy performs radically better under Democratic presidential administrations than Republican ones:

The last three Republican presidents—Bush, Bush, and Trump—have been disasters. The first Bush oversaw a double-dip recession and a massive savings and loan scandal that looted the treasury. The second Bush started a costly and tragic war based on lies and nearly brought the global economy to its knees. Trump, you know about—corruption, fascism, and staggering incompetence.

That’s four decades of failure. In fact, it goes back much farther. I got an email a couple of weeks ago from my friend Simon Rosenberg, who has for years paid careful attention to the performance of the economy under Democratic and Republican administrations. In this email, he had a chart showing that going all the way back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, monthly job growth has averaged 176,000 under Democratic presidents, and 59,000 under Republican ones. Trump’s average over both terms, because of the job loss during the pandemic, is actually in the red, minus 7,000. In his current term, Trump averages 44,000 a month. Joe Biden, you wonder? He averaged 336,000.

There’s so much more. Returning now to the post-Reagan era: From 1989 to 2026, we’ve had Democratic presidents for 20 years and Republicans for 17.4 years. Care to hazard a guess as to the number of jobs created under Democrats vs. Republicans?

Answer: It’s 49.8 million versus 1.9 million. That isn’t a typo. Fifty million to two, basically. Democratic presidents have also done far better than Republicans on median household incomes, GDP rates, the Dow Jones index, and even deficit reduction. Dramatically so on deficit reduction.

I would quibble with this framing: Trump is the worst president in American history by Secretariat at the Belmont margins, while George W. Bush is very solidly in the bottom five, and you could even make an argument for him being runner up, but his father was merely a forgettable mediocrity, like the vast majority of American presidents, historically speaking.

But this is minor detail: Every Republican administration for the past 34 years at least has been a total disaster, and 34 years is a long long time in political terms. Think about when you graduated from high school and subtract 34 years. For me that would be 1944, which might as well have been 1844 from the perspective of an 18-year-old in 1978. The point is that the vast majority of American voters have spent zero percent of their adult lives in an America with an even arguably not terrible Republican president. Then you have all of Tomasky’s data about relative economic performance.

So, six months into yet another Republican foreign policy disaster of epic proportions — I’m actually old enough to remember Bob Dole’s bitter cackling about “Democrat wars,” but again the vast majority of Americans aren’t — the question is, why does American politics consist of Republicans fucking everything up in terms of (checks notes) domestic and foreign affairs, and then Democrats spending years cleaning it all up, before the voters decide again that a trans woman volleyball player in Idaho is more important than all that economy and war stuff?

If you can answer that question, you have solved the mystery of Donald Trump’s brilliant political career.