We could probably go back to the beginning. Or the more unusual parlor room conversation starter might be identifying those (few?) instances when leaders did the absolutely pivotally right thing for the country, even at their own expense. Washington comes to mind, of course, Lincoln, obviously, and LBJ (at least domestically and accompanied by a gigantic and tragic foreign policy asterisk).

For our contemporary purposes, it starts (and others will go back to Jimmy Carter, to be sure, and should, but not for this immediate 25-year exercise) with the Republican establishment's decision in 1999 to back big oil steward George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican Primary, throwing its heft behind a son of former President George H.W. Bush to quash the candidacy of Senator John McCain. Not to glibly gloss over this important part of the timeline, but in order to stay focused on the politics, we can say here simply that in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush led the country to war in Iraq.

Confronted with the 2008 presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party pivoted to Barack Obama, mostly because Clinton, in the words of former Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg of New Jersey - an Obama backer - was "behaving like one of the boys." When she made that assessment on the eve of the New Jersey Democratic Primary, Weinberg had very much in mind Clinton's vote in support of Bush's 2002 Iraq War resolution.

Eight years of Obama produced significant challenges, certainly, but on the international stage the President and his administration restored alliances damaged at the height of Bush's war and implemented strong measures to repair NATO. In hindsight, the President on the eve of the 2016 national election, made a critical political mistake when he backed Hillary Clinton to succeed him instead of then-Vice President Joe Biden. In the years subsequent to Clinton's general election loss, a New Jersey insider pointed out that if the American public wanted Clinton, they would have backed her in 2008. But the party showed an unwillingness to extend beyond a tiny framework of power.

On the Republican side in that same year, the establishment advanced the candidacy of Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Just as Democrats doubled down on a damaged brand with Clinton, Republicans force fed a third Bush candidacy on the country. As the mild-mannered Jeb began a sedate campaign tour, the undercurrent around his supporters contained the heavy suggestion that he would not be incompetent like his older brother and therefore give the Bush Family, er, the country, a shot at redemption. It felt very stilted, tin-eared, rehearsed, and entitled.

Republicans looking for an alternative as far away as possible from Bush III, hit the overcorrecting panic button in favor of TV game show host Donald Trump. Supposedly outrageous and entertaining to generations of rabbit ear-stagnating Americans, Trump took the stage as the opposite kind of personality to the moribund scion of a power-hungry political family. Whatever his personal views on the war on Iraq (he made self-serving, contradictory statements, as usual), by the time Trump materialized as a prez candidate, he became devoutly anti-Iraq War in time to publicly degrade Jeb.

Then he defeated Clinton in the general, in large part by making the case that Clinton occupied the inner sanctum of protected political privilege that likewise kept the Bushes afloat. The corroded insides of both parties recycled the same gastric juices, or at least so the messaging said. Time for another shakeup. Trump had already derailed Bush, now he finished off the second coming of the Beltway's favorite duopoly by beating Hillary Clinton.

Biden defeated Trump in 2020, four years after he should have run as the Democratic Party nominee. The former vice president at 78 years of age advanced with the fairly steady drumbeat behind him that he would only serve a single term and act as a transitional figure. But Biden and his people had other plans. Seduced by the power of office, they decided to stick around, covering up the President's lack of mental fitness for office by limiting his public interactivity. Instead of exiting as a patriotic hero by withdrawing from reelection and empowering his party to conduct a primary, Biden humiliated himself on the debate stage with rival Trump and found himself forced out of the contest. His Vice President, Kamala Harris, ran to her 2024 doom on a short general election runway.

Impaired on the world and domestic stage by an absence of moral authority and in deep domestic trouble ahead of the midterm elections but kept in the game by the consistent anemic missteps of political rivals within a sustaining national overflowing and overturned chamber pot of ignorance, Trump hit the go switch on war.

Whatever one may say or whatever one has said about presidential politics and presidential antics over the past 25-plus years, the repeated failure by the principal players to put the interests of country over personal power (I get it, easier said than done, just look at the Bible, Shakespeare and the Greeks, and probably the rest of American politics, for that matter, certainly European politics) and personal dynastic power, contributed to dissolving even the appearance of the wise use of American power in favor of a quite extraordinary example of personal destructive power, as Trump attacked Iran without congressional approval, scorning the constitutional measures Bush II (half-heartedly) embraced, spurning (but of course) Eisenhower's entreaties about dangerous incursions into presidential decision-making by the military industrial complex, and absolutely about-facing on his own supposedly anti-war arguments expressed at the outset of his formal national campaign career in politics to beat the Bushes.