Contents of said letter from daily beast: https://archive.is/YFBK3#selection-773.0-779.748
“Dear Jonas,” the president wrote to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT.”
And prior to that, we had Ronnie Raygun. W was embarrassing on a lot of levels, but Ronnie Raygun had the most criminal administration in history (at least so far) and the things they did set us on the path we are still on…
I would say the two situations are slightly different.
Watching Futurama and hearing them say that Nixon was the worst president in history AND alternate history is hard to watch now. The writers get a lot of things right, but Trump completely breaks that joke in a heartbreaking way.
My guess is that it had something to do with the age of the writers? Nixon really broke the mold, I guess.
A lot of things happened in the 60s and 70s that broke a lot of cherished myths of post-war America. Seeing JFK and RFK getting assassinated. MLK getting assassinated. Pentagon Papers. An incredibly painful economy. Oil embargoes. Then Nixon and Watergate…then the Church Committee. I’m assuming if they were to do a word association, they’d probably associate Nixon with all or most of this stuff. It definitely made an impression on the boomer mindset.
But Ronnie Raygun was far worse than Nixon. I think at that point, the boomers (and their parents) were just sick of all the bad news and conservative corruption and mostly tuned it out. The media mostly turned away entirely from the Iran/Contra affair.
And of course Bush Senior and W were not exactly great.
And now there’s Taco…
I mean Trump, W, Raygun, Nixon…
Everyone says “caretaker president” perjoratively, but I’m starting to wonder if the presidents who do the least are the best.
Bush the I went to war for oil. No “WMD” bullshit cover story even. Just “we need that oil for profits, go send your children to die”. I stupidly thought that would wake people up.
Ai yi yi.
Well, if they weren’t going to wake up after Iran/Contra…or the allegations that Ronnie Raygun worked to purposefully fuck up the release of the Iran hostages [1] so that he could do it during his Inauguration…but no.
They elected Bush Senior into office even though he was VP in the most criminal administration in history. I guess people could tell themselves that he somehow knew nothing about all the crimes, but…
[1] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a43368900/reagan-iran-hostages/