Trump's gritty reboot of the Bush presidency

Are we living through George W. Bush's third term?

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images, AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Is the glut of pointless remakes and lame sequels inexorable at this point? Personally I thought it had reached its absolute nadir with Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars in 2010, but here we are in 2018 fresh from rehashes of The Mummy and Planet of the Apes and ready to be wowed by a movie about baby Han Solo and Untitled Avengers Film (2019).

It also looks increasingly as if we are in the middle of a gritty reboot of George W. Bush's presidency. First there was the tax cut that nobody wanted except for Paul Ryan and a couple of fracking oligarchs in Oklahoma. Now on the basis of less-than-solid evidence we are bombing the heck out of a Middle Eastern republic that hawks have been looking for excuses to blow up for nearly a decade. We've even got mainstream liberal commentators who otherwise despise the knuckle-dragging right-wing president suddenly praising him for his statesmanlike resolve in making the difficult decision to launch explosives at brown people half a world away. How far away are we at this point from the little-remembered third act where the president almost manages to sell Social Security to Goldman Sachs on the eve of a major financial crisis? Larry Kudlow is probably scribbling away a draft as you read this.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.