Donald Trump and George W Bush have rarely been seen together in public. Only inaugurations and state funerals have put them in the same frame.
However, the similarities between the paths of the two businessmen-turned-presidents – born in the same year just three weeks and about 100 kilometres apart – are increasingly striking and, at the same time, alarming.
Losing control of both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections marks Mr Trump’s “Bush moment”. Twenty years after the former president’s Republican Party suffered a crushing defeat in both the House of Representatives and Senate, the current leader is facing the same fate.
He is now joining a small club of US presidents whose parties have lost control of both chambers in a single midterm election, the fifth in the past century, with the majority of those defeats coming in the shadow of major wars.
In 2006, Mr Bush, who like Mr Trump came from a wealthy family, faced an increasingly unpopular conflict when his party lost control of Congress. The Iraq war was already in its bloodiest year, with American troops facing relentless attacks and Iraqis fighting one another in a brutal sectarian conflict.
The war, launched on claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were never supported by hard evidence, had already damaged America’s standing not only in the Middle East but around the world, with images of prisoners abused at American prisons filling front pages in the US and beyond.
Stubbornly, Mr Bush refused to back down.
After the election results came in, analysts predicted a more pragmatic presidency, with the incumbent under pressure to find a way out of the war, repair relations with Democrats and rebuild the Republican Party ahead of the 2008 presidential election. Instead, he doubled down on his wartime strategy, ordering additional American troops into Iraq.
Mr Trump’s war with Iran has brought him to a similar political crossroads. The conflict’s impact is being felt far beyond the Middle East, reaching American cities through higher fuel prices and increasing living costs. Economic changes that unfold over decades have happened within months.
However, Mr Trump’s Bush moment carries potentially greater risks than the one in 2006.
Mr Trump, who like Mr Bush has a distinctive American accent, seems to have reached a place where he has no other choice but to end the Iranian threat once and for all, either through military action or through an elusive peace deal.
Of course, for the current president legacy matters the most. As unpredictable as his policy is, if there is one thing certain about him, it is that he won’t accept being defined in history books by a war he started and didn’t finish. If anything, he would want to be “the greatest president of all”, and that could be as dangerous as it sounds.
Beyond politics, the American media defined Mr Bush’s presidency by his distinctive personality. Late-night television shows regularly featured clips of his verbal slips, awkward gestures and occasional mishaps, from losing a basketball to a kid to struggling with a door.
Mr Trump’s two terms have received similar treatment. His New York accent, unusual phrasing, harsh exchanges with journalists and physical gestures have provided a seemingly endless supply of material for talk show hosts.
“I’m the decider,” Mr Bush declared in 2006, a remark that became one of the defining expressions of his presidency and was named a Bushism of the year by the Global Language Monitor. In a similar vein, Mr Trump called himself “Mr Veto” ahead of the elections, delivering another striking quote from his Trumpism dictionary.
Both men, no matter how much they were ridiculed, have left deep marks on America’s global standing, especially in the Middle East, where some argue they were the best leaders to ever engage with the region, while many others say the opposite.
In 2003, Mr Bush invaded Iraq, opening wounds that still shape the country and the wider region more than two decades later. And in 2017, Mr Trump chose Saudi Arabia for his first overseas presidential visit, signalling the start of a new chapter in Washington’s relationship with the Middle East.
Mr Bush’s war legacy ended with a shoe thrown at him at a news conference in Baghdad in 2008, in one of the most remembered chapters of his career, which was first defined by the 2001 terrorist attacks of September 11. Will we see Mr Trump in Tehran two years from now?
