Speaker 1: I've been very careful when we've been talking about George W. Bush during the
Donald Trump era not to participate in the rehabilitation of George W. Bush's image.
And this is one of the dangers of not talking about former presidents, which we discussed
a few weeks ago, which is they end up being allowed either implicitly or explicitly to
sort of rewrite their own history and legacy as presidents of the United States.
In George W. Bush's case, his legacy is not taking the 9/11 threat seriously enough to
start with, more importantly, reacting to the 9/11 attacks by invading a country that
didn't do it.
The country of Iraq declaring mission accomplished years early, staying in a total quagmire of
a situation while hemorrhaging money and blowing up the deficit, all to get us nothing while
committing war crimes.
That's a bad legacy.
And I haven't even mentioned the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which is another
complete and total fiasco.
And yes, at the same time as an individual compared to Donald Trump, Bush's less wacky.
He's less obviously unhinged.
He sounds more reasonable.
He seems to relate to people just on an individual level in a more normal way than Donald Trump.
But George W. Bush has partially rehabbed his image by becoming friends with Michelle
Obama and by being friends with Ellen DeGeneres and painting portraits of veterans.
And now he's sort of like a friendly, older past president who just wants everybody to
get along.
So the point is, I've been careful when we say, wow, even George W. Bush realizes that
this thing Trump did or that thing Trump did is terrible to understand the context of the
horrible legacy of George W. Bush.
Now, that gets us to this morning.
This morning, George W. Bush appeared on the Today show and he actually laid out a pretty
cogent case against the direction of the modern Republican Party since Bush left office through
the Obama administration and during Donald Trump's one term presidency.
And he is completely correct.
He arguably doesn't even go far enough.
Let's listen and then we'll talk about it.
Speaker 3: I would describe it as isolationist, protectionist and to a certain extent, nativist,
disappointed.
Well, that's not exactly my vision.
But you know what?
I'm just an old guy they put out to pasture.
So just a simple painter.
A simple Speaker 1: painter.
So let's take this in pieces.
I mean, first of all, is what George W. Bush is saying, correct?
It is correct.
The Republican Party has gone since Bush left more fully to the I don't even know that I'd
call it isolationism and protectionism.
I'd call it nationalism.
And yes, nativism and even nativism doesn't really go far enough.
It's really more it's almost like a xenophobia that's very popular in white nationalist circles.
It's it goes beyond nativist.
So Bush is right and he probably doesn't go far enough.
Now, it is true or better said, is it true that this is not Bush's vision for the party,
as he says, and that it wasn't Bush's vision when he was president?
Well, yes, sort of.
But the truth is more complicated.
It's not.
The Republican Party has now gone nativist xenophobe.
And Bush wasn't at all that when he was president of the United States.
The reality is that Bush's GOP was maybe more indifferent to the nativism and they played
coy with the nativism.
And while they were less cartoonishly talking about it in the way Trump did, they allowed
it.
And they even had many people that were part of the administration that were very much
of that mindset.
Bush personally like his Bush personally, a nativist xenophobe, like what he now criticizes
about the Republican Party.
Probably not.
I don't really know.
But it's sort of like his Trump personally anti-Semitic.
We talked before.
Well, you know, Trump has a Jewish daughter by conversion.
Ivanka and his son in law, Jared Kushner, and Trump has Jewish grandkids.
And all this stuff doesn't really matter.
Trump coalesced the antisemite, so his personal view isn't super relevant to me.
Whatever George W. Bush's personal view of the nativist, xenophobic wing of the Republican
Party is, Bush's presidency certainly didn't call out that wing of the Republican Party,
and it allowed that wing to grow into what it became during Obama and ultimately led
to Donald Trump.
So with all of these issues, it's more complicated than what Bush believes and it's more nuanced
than Bush wasn't at all on the isolationist, nativist GOP side.
It's more like Bush probably calculated that the Republican Party was going in that direction.
Even if it wasn't his thing.
He found a way to placate that wing without being as cartoonishly welcoming of it as Donald
Trump was.
So what this gets us to is like, how should we react when George W. Bush criticizes Trump
and now is.
Criticizing the modern Republican Party, is Bush a hero for calling it out, or is he a
foe who's pretending not to have been a part of it?
Neither life is more complicated.
It's not always black and white.
The reaction for me is Bush was a disaster.
But even Bush realizes that the Republican Party sends him and under Trump is an even
bigger disaster, but he's also partially responsible for it.
They all are right.
I mean, you know what the right during the civil rights era, into the Vietnam era, into
Reagan, into Gingrich and then so on, into Bush.
Right.
I mean, it's all part of what got that party to what it is today.
And you don't have to praise George W. Bush to realize that.
But you can also recognize the role that he either implicitly or explicitly or by negligence
had in getting the party to where it is today.
That being said, it's I wonder.
How much of the modern Republican electorate, which is mostly behind Donald Trump care,
is what George W. Bush says at this point in time?
I don't know.
The answer to that remains to be seen