Presidents these days always seem to get worse, don’t they?

To many on the left, Donald Trump is an order of magnitude more disastrous a commander in chief than was George W. Bush, whose reputation now stands thoroughly rehabilitated in the popular culture. Bush is no longer the incurious man who launched an unnecessary war that killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq; today, he’s the goofy old fella who paints portraits of the troops, pals around with Michelle Obama and seems to be in on the joke of our times.

“Sorta makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it?” Bush has been reported to smirk about the Trump era.

For the record, I think the jury is still out on whether Trump is worse than Bush. But for most of 2019, I’ve been trying to picture a future that elevates Trump in the same way it did Bush: How much worse could all t his get? And worse in what direction — what politics, policies, rhetoric and media mastery will the next extremely terrible president marshal to ruin America anew?

In short: What sort of character do we have to imagine occupying the White House in 2029 to make lefties like myself feel even a slight pang of nostalgia for the good old days of Donald J. Trump?

The thought experiment is instructive because it compels us to ponder some of the fundamental forces shaping American culture and politics at the moment. It is also horrifying, because what quickly becomes evident is that we might now be only in the middle of everything spinning out of control.