Do we like them?

Do we like George W. Bush?

Our score: 5 out of 10. A huge global health achievement sits next to a campaign for a same-sex marriage ban and a war launched on weapons claims that proved wrong.

George W. Bush was US president from 2001 to 2009, and the one thing most people agree on is PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program he announced in his 2003 State of the Union. By the time it turned 20, the State Department's tally put it at around 25 million lives saved. Those are modelled estimates, not a head count, but even the cautious ones are huge. The upbringing and early career are thin in what I could open, so this is mostly about the presidency and after.

The Iraq war is the stain that won't wash out. On 22 January 2003 he said “The dictator of Iraq has got weapons of mass destruction.” After the Duelfer report found no stockpiles, he acknowledged the pre-war intelligence was wrong but still defended the invasion. Defenders call it an intelligence failure rather than a deliberate deception; critics say the case was overstated. Either way, the cost in lives was enormous.

Since leaving office the record looks different. In 2021 he published Out of Many, One, 43 oil portraits of immigrants with their stories, which was a case for immigration reform. In 2025 he joined Barack Obama in opposing the shutdown of USAID, the agency behind much of PEPFAR's delivery. I found no recent run of harmful words or dodgy company, which is rarer than it should be for an ex-president.

The recent bit: on Presidents Day 2026 he wrote an essay on Substack about Washington, who gave up power willingly. The Daily Beast framed it as a swipe at Trump, but that is the outlet's reading, since he named no one. Other commentators argued it wasn't a criticism of Trump at all, so where you land depends on how you read the silence. Axios also noted he wasn't on the speaker list for the Republican convention.

Do we support him? He gets full credit for PEPFAR and for the way he has spoken up for immigrants and for global health since leaving office. He also gets full blame for pushing a same-sex marriage ban and for taking the country to war on claims that didn't hold. That's why he lands in the middle: real good and real harm, and he's neither villain nor hero.