What would Barbara Bush do? If she were still with us, the former First Lady would be jumping up and down to urge her son, George W. Bush, to put country before party and endorse Kamala Harris for president. Her namesake, granddaughter Barbara Pierce Bush, one of the former president’s twin daughters, recently joined the Harris-Walz campaign in Pennsylvania, telling People magazine, “I’m hopeful they’ll move our country forward and protect women’s rights.”
The pressure on her father to voice his endorsement is increasing. During a live interview that aired Friday on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, Liz Cheney said, “I can’t explain why George W. Bush hasn’t spoken out, but I think it’s time, and I wish that he would.”
Barbara Bush, 42, is co-founder of Global Health Corps, which trains young leaders to address health inequities. Her interest in global health is a natural offshoot of her father’s legacy with PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief), which is praised across party lines but could come under fire in a second Trump administration.
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If the former president declines to follow his daughter’s lead, it could be a difficult Thanksgiving in Crawford, Texas. Perhaps Bush doesn’t want to draw attention to the PEPFAR program he enshrined into law before leaving the White House. Maybe he doesn’t want to fall in step with his vice-president, Dick Cheney, who together with Liz, his daughter, has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket.
The two men had a rocky second term together as Bush refused to pardon Cheney’s top aide, Scooter Libby, for lying and obstruction of justice in leaking the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame. President Trump pardoned him in 2018.
Whatever the reasons—personal or political—it seems a mystery that the former president hasn’t followed his mother’s lead.
Barbara Bush made her dislike of Donald Trump very well known. In the book The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of a Dynasty, she was quoted as calling Trump “a symbol of greed,” and saying she no longer considered herself to be a Republican because of his presidency. In a 2019 Washington Times interview, Trump hit back: “I have heard that she was nasty to me, but she should be. Look what I did to her sons.”
It was widely assumed that then-President Trump was not welcome at her funeral in 2018. Four of the five living presidents attended. The White House said in a statement that the president did not attend to avoid disruption and added security. Melania Trump attended in his stead.
Earlier this year, George W. Bush’s office issued a statement stating the former president “retired from presidential politics” some years ago, and would not be endorsing in the current race or revealing his vote.
The absence of an endorsement speaks volumes, and it is out of character with the George W. we knew. At Trump’s inauguration after his surprise win in 2016, Bush was seated by Hillary Clinton and reportedly said Trump’s “American carnage” speech “was some weird s--t.”
Since then, he appears only rarely at big public events and has not taken any public stand about the direction Trump has taken his party. Painting is his therapy, and he devotes time and money to causes involving wounded veterans. Yet he must be disheartened by the way Trump has targeted immigrants, both legal and undocumented.
As the former governor of a border state, Texas, Bush saw immigration as a positive, and pressed for much-needed reform in Congress. A version of the Kennedy-McCain bill forged by the lions of both political parties, Ted Kennedy and John McCain, in 2005, passed the Senate in 2006 but never got a vote in the House.
The Bush family has ample cause to speak out against Trump. Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, ran for president in 2016 and was one of many Republicans ridiculed and driven out of the race by Trump’s mean-spirited barbs. “Low-energy Jeb,” Trump called him, mocking the candidate for bringing his mother on the campaign trail.
Bush family endorsements are among the few that are left that could make a difference in a race that is so close, that the elder statesmen of the Republican Party we once knew could change minds. Former National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s voice is also missing in action, as is that of former Secretary of State James Baker.
How hard is it to urge Americans in a free society to vote against a candidate who says his political adversary should face a firing squad?
Bush’s daughter, Barbara, is making her grandmother proud. There’s still time for the former president to take a stand on behalf of the men in his family. His father, former President George H.W. Bush, was not known for taking bold stands on issues (although he did vote for Hillary Clinton, not Trump, in 2016). But he was a war hero who upheld the decency of the office, and he did what his outspoken wife demanded of him when he knew she was right.
