Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have consistently expressed their disagreement with President Donald Trump, through his election and into his presidency. But in The Last Republicans, a new book from historian Mark Updegrove about the father and son, they unleash their Trump trash-talking, as shown in book previews from CNN and the New York Times.
“I don’t like him. I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s a blowhard. And I’m not too excited about him being a leader,” Bush senior told Updegrove in May 2016. During Trump’s campaign, Bush said he felt Trump had “a certain ego” and felt he’d need to have “humility” in order to unite the country.
Updegrove said the younger Bush echoed this point on humility and said that when he heard Trump call himself his own adviser, he thought, “Wow, this guy doesn’t know what it means to be president.” However, unlike his father, George W. Bush did not vote for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and instead left the top of his ticket blank.
Updegrove said the title of the book came from a conversation he had with the junior Bush in which he said, “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president.” However, at the time, he thought Bush was more concerned that Clinton would win the presidency, not Trump. But under Updegrove’s analysis of their values and those of past Republican presidents compared to Trump’s exhibition of Republicanism, the title still stands.
“…If you look at his values and those shared by his father and Ronald Reagan, they are very much in contrast to the values of the Republican Party today, in particular the platform that Donald Trump ran on, which is essentially protectionism and a certain xenophobia,” Updegrove told the Times.
H/T the Hill