Former President George W. Bush finds himself in unfamiliar territory: yukking it up with liberal late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and being feted on other television shows on which celebrities are feted while casting a quizzical eye at the party he led during two terms in the White House.
Bush found himself having to walk back an assessment of the Republican Party he gave early in his latest book tour. “I would describe it as isolationist, protectionist, and, to a certain extent, nativist,” he told NBC’s Today show. The 43rd president, out promoting a collection featuring his paintings of immigrants, soon conceded he “painted with too broad a brush.”
“Really what I should have said — there’s loud voices who are isolationists, protectionists, and nativists, something, by the way, I talked about when I was president,” Bush told People magazine.
When Bush was president, Republicans who disagreed with him on foreign policy, trade, or immigration were outliers within the party. Some party leaders said then-Texas Rep. Ron Paul should be excluded from future Republican presidential debates or even ejected from the GOP for his criticism of the Iraq War during one such event in South Carolina in 2007.
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But the most recent Republican president, Donald Trump, disagreed with Bush on all three policy areas. Trump also criticized Bush and the war in Iraq from a South Carolina debate stage in 2016. Instead of credible calls for his ouster from the party, Trump won the state’s primary and en route to the nomination and the presidency while Jeb Bush, the 43rd president’s older brother and the former governor of Florida, dropped out of the race.
“That was some weird s—,” Bush reportedly said after attending Trump’s inaugural address in 2017. The son of a Republican president and grandson of a Republican senator hasn’t seemed quite as comfortable in the party since. He recently said he wrote in former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for president last year.
It is not dissimilar from the reactions of former House Speaker John Boehner, who is also on a book tour even more closely hooked to his dissatisfaction with the direction of the party. But Bush, more than Boehner, was once its uncontested leader, boasting job approval ratings among Republican voters that were greater than 90% (in the aftermath of 9/11, his numbers briefly reached that level among the electorate as a whole).
Immigration was the first issue on which rank-and-file Republicans began to rebel against Bush. They blocked legislation he backed that would have legalized most illegal immigrants in the country. Even when the support was present in the Senate, Boehner and subsequent GOP leaders would not bring it up for a House vote.
Not coincidentally, immigration became a signature issue for the Trump campaign. He pledged to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and led the “build the wall” chants at his rallies, once telling the New York Times they were a surefire way to fire up the rallygoers if he ever saw himself starting to lose the crowd. He clamped down on illegal immigration and brought into the White House advisers who favored lower immigration levels in general.
Bush strongly suggested throughout Trump’s administration that he disagreed with this shift. He told conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt earlier this month he supported immigration legislation similar to the pathway to citizenship favored by President Joe Biden. “We’ve got a coalition of like-minded people working on this issue,” Bush said.
During Bush’s second term, the Iraq War became unpopular. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina was widely panned. The more conservative Republicans in Congress began balking at high spending levels. A financial crisis and recession tanked Bush’s approval ratings, which fell from a first-term average of 62% to a second-term average of 37%, according to Gallup. Bush’s low point was 25%, below the worst rating Trump ever recorded.
Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Two years later, Democrats also swept into the White House, with former President Barack Obama winning the highest share of the popular vote of any presidential candidate since Bush’s father in 1988.
“Sadly, I think the amount of influence President Bush has on the party today isn’t much,” said Republican strategist Jim Dornan. “I think a lot of the pro-Trump crowd blames him for Obama and are not happy with the circumstances around the Iraq War.”
But Bush did see his image rebound in some circles while Trump was in office. He became known for his bipartisan friendship with former first lady Michelle Obama, with whom he shared candy during his father’s funeral, and paintings such as those in his new book.
“His voice is needed and welcomed,” said veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz. “It may not be the loudest voice in the GOP, but it’s an essential voice.”
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Some Republicans are engaged in a debate about what the party should look like going forward, with Bush and Trump presented as competing models. Some GOP admirers of Bush and critics of Trump, such as third-ranking House Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have grown more outspoken.
“I also think that he can have more influence in the post-Trump era given how civil he has been since he left office and allowed both Obama and Trump to maneuver without him looking over their shoulders. And I think his weighing in on the immigration issue is a positive move because it deals with the reality of where this country’s attitudes on the issue have moved,” Dornan said. “Lastly, I think there are a lot of Republicans who might welcome back the civility that he brought to the presidency.”
