George W. Bush

George W. Bush had been in office for 233 days when the September 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,977 people and remade his presidency entirely. The son of a former president, a recovering alcoholic turned evangelical Christian who had run in 2000 on a modest platform of "compassionate conservatism" and a promise to avoid the nation-building adventures of the Clinton era — the smoke over lower Manhattan ended all of that.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq consumed his two terms. The invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 toppled the Taliban regime that had harbored al-Qaeda. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 — justified by claims of weapons of mass destruction that proved false — became one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions in modern American history. By the time Bush left office, more than 4,400 American soldiers had died in Iraq, and the country had descended into sectarian insurgency.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005 and exposed catastrophic failures of federal emergency management, leaving over 1,800 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. The federal response — and Bush's praise of FEMA director Michael Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job") — became a symbol of governmental incompetence that damaged his presidency beyond recovery.

The 2008 financial crisis erupted in his final months. The collapse of the housing market triggered the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. Bush signed the $700 billion TARP bailout — a deeply unpopular measure that helped stabilize the banking system but completed his political undoing. He left office with a 22 percent approval rating, among the lowest recorded for any departing president.