Steven C. Markoff
LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, March 29, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ — According to a President Joe Biden administration official, the White House has returned the official portraits of former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to a traditional display spot after they were relocated to a less prominent position last year.
The portraits were relocated to the Old Family Dining Room, a smaller dining room off the State Dining Room that is less frequented by visitors, in July under President Donald J. Trump, and replaced with portraits of Republican presidents, according to CNN.
According to a White House official who was not allowed to talk publicly about the decision, the portraits of Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton were restored to their usual positions in the Cross Hall on Inauguration Day by the Office of the Curator. Between the State Dining Room and the East Room is the Cross Hall. Given the interest in the George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump administrations, see what acclaimed author Steven C. Markoff, who also runs a free searchable database containing over 42,000 curated and sourced quotes on Trump at AboutTrump.org, has to say about some of their similarities and a difference.
“As noted by Richard Clarke in this foreword to my book, The Case Against George W. Bush, it’s difficult to discuss the administration of George W. Bush without thinking about some comparisons to Donald J. Trump’s administration.
An obvious similarity is that Presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump both achieved the presidency losing the popular vote but winning the presidency through the Electoral College. (Winning the presidency while losing the popular vote has only happened three other times in our country’s 59 presidential elections. The other three presidential elections where the popular vote loser won the presidency was in 1824, 1876 and 1888. Another similarity is that W. Bush and Trump’s actions and non-actions caused the unnecessary and not accidental deaths of thousands of Americans and others.
As chronicled in my book, even before his inauguration, George W. essentially closed his eyes and hid the substantial intelligence he received prior to 9/11 predicting that we would be attacked by the terrorists Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. W’s hiding that Intel while not moving to protect us from those threats increased the chances that we would be attacked, which we were on September 11, 2001.
Bush hid those threats from our country, while selling us on the unsubstantiated dangers from Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Almost 3,000 Americans died in those 9/11 attacks, attacks that some knowledgeable people believed could have been avoided. Those attacks generated fear of further attacks, fear that Bush skillfully used to mislead our Congress and our people into the unnecessary 2003 Iraq War in which over 500,000 people died. Looking back, it is well documented that Bush, from his first days in office, was planning to take over Iraqi oil.
Trump, as is now well known, admitted in his taped interviews with Bob Woodward last year, that he downplayed and hid the danger of the Covid pandemic from our country, while disparaging and mocking those wearing masks or practicing social distancing. Trump’s downplaying the need to mitigate the pandemic danger caused thousands of Americans to unnecessarily die from Covid when Trump should have been telling our country about the dangers of the virus and supporting public health measures to limit the spread of the virus. While over 500,000 Americans have so far died from Covid, no one knows what that death toll would have been if Trump had used his Covid knowledge and presidential powers to protect us.
One difference between the two presidents is that while Bush hid dangers to our country from Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, he was taking us into the tragic Iraq war, mainly for commercial purposes, oil. Trump hid the dangers of the Covid virus from our country, apparently in his calculation of increasing, or not losing, his raw political power.
Additionally, while Bush was secretly hunting Iraqi oil at the expense of so many lives, he at least followed many of our societal governmental norms. Trump, on the other hand, in his determined push for political power, worked to destroy our democracy by denigrating the three branches of our government and disputing the fairness and the outcome of our elections.
In sum, both Bush and Trump seemed similarly adept at coverups of major proportions while sacrificing thousands of Americans (and others) to die for their own political or commercial ends.
Who was the better or worse president is an interesting question but the answer surely depends on what we know about their actions filtered by our own biases.
In my opinion, putting personalities and politics aside, Presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump were both at least guilty of criminal negligence for their actions and non-actions while in office, because their conduct, as set out above, caused the unnecessary and unjustifiable deaths of so many.”
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Steven C. Markoff
Mr. Markoff is a native of Los Angeles, California. A graduate of Los Angeles City College in 1964 with an Associate of Arts degree. His affiliations include: the precious metals and numismatic business for 50 years (1954-2005); Chairman and CEO of A-Mark Financial Corporation, a Santa Monica-based financial services company he founded in 1965 (originally named A-Mark Coin Company), that purchased the U.S. Wilkison Gold Pattern Collection and Redfield Silver Dollar hoard; the A-Mark Foundation, a private foundation he founded in 1997 became the parent of free searchable databases and other nonpartisan information covering interesting and important social issues and history, such as sites on George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Special Investigations Involving US Presidents Since 1973. In 2016, the Foundation founded the website, AboutTrump.org. In 2004 Markoff helped found A-Mark Entertainment a company he co-chairs; and that year he also founded ProCon.org, a 501(c)(3) public charity promoting critical thinking that as of 12-31-2019, had been, or is being used by over 10,000 schools in over 90 countries. [ProCon.org was merged into Encyclopædia Britannica on 5-29-2020]. Mr. Markoff also has an interest in The TCL Chinese [Grauman’s] in Hollywood, acquired in 2011. In 2018, Markoff founded SexEd.net, a website giving straight-forward, sourced information about sex and sexually related issues. In 2020, Markoff launched SecondAmendment.org, a website that has many of the pieces of the puzzle that make up our individual rights to arms.
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