George W. Bush comes out of retirement to deliver a veiled rebuke of Trump

George W. Bush comes out of retirement to deliver a veiled rebuke of Trump

Former president George W. Bush on Thursday delivered a rare political speech in which he warned of threats to American democracy and a decay of civic engagement, a message that was interpreted as a rebuke of President Trump’s divisive leadership style.

At a New York forum sponsored by his presidential center, Bush offered a blunt assessment of a political system corrupted by “conspiracy theories and outright fabrication” in which nationalism has been “distorted into nativism.”

“We’ve seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty,” Bush said during a 16-minute address at “The Spirit of Liberty” event. “Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone and provides permission for cruelty and bigotry. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.”

Bush did not mention Trump by name and former aides emphasized that his message echoed words he has spoken before. But the fact that a former president was sounding the alarm about American values and the United States’ role in the world at a time when Trump has unsettled allies abroad and provoked intense political backlash at home injected his remarks with greater urgency.

The scene was remarkable in part because Bush has largely remained out of the political spotlight since leaving office amid low popularity in 2009 and had made a point not to criticize or second-guess his Democratic successor, Barack Obama. Just hours after Bush completed his speech, Obama also made a veiled critique of the Trump era, calling on Democrats at a New Jersey campaign event to “send a message to the world that we are rejecting a politics of division, we are rejecting a politics of fear.”

That Trump’s two most recent predecessors felt liberated, or perhaps compelled, to reenter the political arena in a manner that offered an implicit criticism of him is virtually unprecedented in modern politics, historians said. Trump has been harshly critical of both Bush and Obama — calling each of them the “worst” president at one time or another — and mercilessly mocked the 43rd president’s brother, Jeb Bush, during the 2016 Republican primary.

George W. Bush was taking aim at Trump’s “roiling of the traditional institutions of the country and, in particular, demeaning the office of the president by a kind of crude or vulgar bashing of opponents,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian and author.

“I think this is Bush throwing down the gauntlet and feeling that this is a man who has gone too far,” Dallek said. The discretion former presidents traditionally afforded their successors “is now sort of fading to the past because of the belligerence of Trump.”

It’s not just the former presidents. Two days ago, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), while receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal, lambasted “half-baked, spurious nationalism” and suggested the United States was abandoning its leadership role, an approach the Vietnam War veteran and former prisoner of war called “unpatriotic.”

McCain’s critique prompted Trump to warn him to “be careful” because he is prepared to “fight back.”

The common thread among Bush’s and McCain’s words was a defense of the post-World War II liberal order that America helped build which supported strong security alliances, a defense of human rights and an open economic system of free trade, said Richard Fontaine, who served on the National Security Council under Bush and was a foreign policy adviser to McCain.