There is a direct line between GWB and Trump. The lies of the Bush administration and it’s denigration of the “reality-based community” laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s Big Lies. if Al Gore won in 2000, I doubt we would have Trump today. Ron Suskind wrote all about it in the NYT back then. This article about the article is not behind their paywall:

https://theweek.com/articles/854892/what-karl-rove-right-about-realitybased-community

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”