Many felt he won fraudulently both times -- in one election by hanging chads, and the Supreme Court ultimately interrupting the count to declare him the winner by a mere few hundred votes. There were voting machine fraud cases in the other election enough to have tipped the balance.
All that said, he was viewed more as a largely incompetent bungler in the early days and the biggest fear most had was his oil ties and the risk of war overseas--not an all out assault on our freedoms, rights and liberties here at home.
By September he had allowed 911 attacks to happen by ignoring security briefings, showing himself to be a fool.
That actually rallied even his enemies though against the common enemy (Al Qaeda) and just about everyone supported the war in Afghanistan to get bin Laden (which Bush never did, Obama took out bin Laden).
But Bush then started a war based on lies, falsely claiming weapons of mass destruction when he started America's first-ever preemptive war in Iraq in 2003. By then whatever support or goodwill he once had pretty much dissolved. With passage of things like the Patriot Act he lost the civil libertarians. Many suspected the war was really all about oil, as both Bush and Cheney came from the oil industry.
He somehow won reelection in 2004 (not uncommon for wartime presidents) but when Katrina hit his incompentence was exposed again for all to see. By Sept. 2005 I covered an anti-war march in Wash. DC that had a half million people. If someone can tell me how to load up photos off my hard drive I would do so.
Despite all that, he was viewed more as an incompetent party-boy controlled by "Darth Vader" Dick Cheney, a VP so bad nobody realyl wanted to impeach Bush or we'd be stuck with pure evil.
That said, in his early weeks while many of us had grave concerns about him they were nowhere near as extreme as with Trump.
Bush was not known to be a racist or sexist. He never proposed things like mass deportations or banning people based on religions. He often said we were not at war with Islam, but with extremists.
He at least came across as personable, the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with, or so his supporters said. He did surround himself with an experienced cabinet, who though conservative were mostly competent. he did not attempt things as radical as proposing to do away with the Dept. of Education or the Environmental Protection Agency, though he did sign laws that weakened environmental protections.
There were worse scandals later in his presidency including the shameful treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghrad and Guantanamo. The country went into a recession.
But for most people on the homefront, we never felt our basic system of democracy was being threatened. Bush didn't attack the courts that I can recall and was never outright insulting. While clearly the worst president we'd have up to that point, we all felt if we could survive the Bush years we could recover what was lost.
Bush also didn't have the control of Congress with one-party rule that Trump has, which makes Trump far more dangerous.
Trump is now involved so heavily in talking about voter fraud that's non-existent, meaning he wants to impose rules to rig the process worse than it already is. He's working actively to dismantle public education, the EPA, install an Attorney General with an anti-civil rights record etc. Even Bush did not appoint people we feared in high places, with the exception of some of the defense and national security posts.
Trump has actual Nazi tendencies. While there were whispers of Bush's grandfather once being a financier to the Nazis, that was as close as it came. Trump himself is clearly racist, as was his father who participated in a KKK rally. Far from trying to distance himself, Trump appointed Bannon, publisher of a racist and anti-Semitic faux-news site, and a racist AG. He is pushing for a return to torture and secret black ops. He wants to deport 8 million undocumented immigrants (so far, per the LA Times) and keep Muslims out and anybody else from non-white nations that he can get away with.
He also attacks the press and his enemies in ways not normally seen in democracies, only dictatorships. His praise for Putin, a murderous dictator who may well have influenced the election through hacking, is also chilling and unprecedented.
Bad as Bush was, or Nixon or Reagan, I would take any of them in a heartbeat over the evil, heartless, and probably deranged narcissitic maniac now in the White House. I fear he could even start a nucllear war in a fit of anger, given his childish tirades and questions over why can't we just use nukes.
I am nearly 60, have been a journalist for 35 years, and have never felt more afraid of any public figure than this one.
Of course we all have more internet access nowadays to know what is happening, things once hidden behind closed doors perhaps. But overall I do believe Trump is a million times more frightening than Bush on his worst days.
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