“Bush’s history is being rewritten, 15 years after Hurricane Katrina”

In the heat outside the Astrodome in Houston, Jacqueline Green spun her wheelchair from one long queue to another. She was scarred by her difficulties on the flight from New Orleans and consumed by worries about how things would go for her children and grandchildren after the disaster.

During our conversation at the meeting place in Houston, he fumbled with a tissue to get rid of the tears.

“Our leaders could dedicate themselves to us instead of starting wars abroad,” he said.

If the Iraq war woke up Strong international criticism of George W Bush, it was the handling of Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005 that permanently reduced his reputation in the country. The tropical cyclone blew the walls around New Orleans, causing severe flooding as a result.

The journalists who saw the devastation caused by the bodies of water will never forget it. In the refugee camps of Mississippi, Texas, we met shocked and frustrated people.

A natural disaster is difficult preventable, but the effects are preventable, and a flood in New Orleans had long been considered a realistic option in several disaster preparedness studies in the United States. Still, there was no evacuation plan and emergencies degenerated into looting and shooting.

The president was on vacation at his Texas ranch, and when he returned to Washington DC a few days earlier, he was allowed to be photographed surveying the disaster area remotely from the airplane window. Employees have testified that they came to deeply regret that image.

Two thirds of the population in New Orleans it was black and 30 percent of the population was classified as poor. From African-American lawmakers to church leaders to civil rights activists, the president accused the United States of ignoring minorities and their difficulties. As recently as 2015, US News and World Report magazine declared that Katrina was the beginning to the end of President George W. Bush.

But in November 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election. Then the representative’s reconsideration began.

In late July this year, George W. Bush appeared with fellow former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at the funeral of civil rights activist John Lewis. Bush spoke about love, duty and sacrifice for others.

“The funeral was a balm to America’s soul,” read a blunt comment in the Washington Post. Columnist Kathleen Parker felt the ceremony was marked by honor, dignity, humility, and grace. She added that Bush was in her prime, a deeply compassionate and humble man.

Everything is relative, and aversion to Trump has put George W. Bush’s action in a different light, and especially in relation to the black and brown population of the United States.

Perhaps it paved the way for change as early as the farewell to the White House in January 2009. Then the groundwork was laid for what was later perceived as a genuine friendship with, above all, Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle.

They were captured in a warm embrace during the opening of an African American museum in Washington DC in September 2016. She described him as “a wonderful man” and claimed that an agreement can be reached across partisan lines.

When Donald Trump has influenced on racism, and tempered by the atrocities of the white power movement, George W. Bush has struck hard. After the 2017 Charlottesville riots, he compared the idea of ​​white supremacy to blasphemy against the American nation.

It is a well-known fact that Bush’s relatives have found it difficult to reconcile with his successor, Donald Trump. Brother Jeb Bush refused to cast his vote for the Republican candidate after losing to Trump in the primaries. Mother Barbara Bush accused Trump of saying terrible things. His wife, Laura Bush, wrote an open letter in the Washington Post describing the new US immigration policy as cruel and immoral.

George W. Bush did not He did not vote in the 2016 presidential election and, according to unconfirmed media reports, he will not vote in the 2020 election either. He has not attended the Republican convention in the last week, when a new hurricane approached the southern coast of the United States .

At the same time, it’s hard to avoid the fact that he has indirectly benefited from his successor – that Trump may be the best thing that could happen to George W Bush, insofar as he cares about his legacy as president.

When Bush left the White House in January 2009, only a third of voters thought he had done a good job. But after two years with Trump, 61 percent said in a CNN poll that they had a positive opinion of Bush. Above all, his reputation among Democratic voters had improved dramatically.

There are many signs that the pandemic and protests have intensified the trend. In early May, George W Bush went on to urge Americans to look beyond party lines and remain united in the fight against COVID-19. During the demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s death in a police operation in Minneapolis in late May, he issued a written statement that the United States must qualify its tragic failures and that it was shocking that so many black citizens were harassed and threatened. in your own country.

Some old critics are wondering now I wonder why they have begun to feel respect and admiration for a president of whom they were once so deeply critical. In a text in The Week in May, Damon Linker claimed that the contrast with Trump played an important role: it reminded him of how Bush condemned intolerance towards American Muslims after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how he fought AIDS in Africa instead of insisting. that the United States would go first in all situations.

Linker says he has come to realize what he took for granted, before Trump, that a president can “speak for and for the entire nation.”

But not everyone has been moved. Critics say the Bush administration paved the way for Trump, with lies about Iraq and a culture war for values ​​at home. In a furious article in Teen Vogue, Sarah Souli argues that Bush’s invasion of Iraq can be seen as an expression of American racism, imperialism and colonialism, the core of everything that protests against the Black Lives Matter movement.

She thinks the media have a hard time distinguishing between exaltation and general emptiness, and that Bush may appear more presidential only because he cares so little about his job.

Maybe it’s too soon To tell how it goes Historian Jon Meacham has noted that it takes 25 to 30 years to evaluate the efforts of a US president. The final version of this text on the Bush legacy can be written to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, in August 2035.