AS IF HE NEEDED IT, Donald J. Trump was encouraged early on to consider politics by a man he had never met, Richard Nixon. After Nixon’s wife, Pat, saw Trump on The Phil Donahue Show in December 1987, the former president, now largely rehabilitated as a foreign policy and political sage, wrote Trump a short missive from his office in New York City’s Federal Plaza.
Dear Donald,
I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great on the Donahue Show.
As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!
With warm regards,
Sincerely,
Not all former Republican presidents, however, saw Trump’s charm. Sometime in the 1990s, well before Donald Trump reached a new level of fame through reality TV, George H. W. Bush found himself waiting in the noncommercial terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport while the private plane on which he would travel was being serviced for a mechanical issue. As he passed the time by reading a newspaper, Jean Becker, his chief of staff, was approached by an airport attendant who told her that Trump Air was about to land. “Would President Bush like to say hello to Mr. Trump?” she asked Becker, who dutifully presented the opportunity to Bush. “God, no,” he replied as he peered over his reading glasses. “Is he coming in here?” Becker indicated that she didn’t know, whereupon the former president raised the newspaper to shield his face in the event Trump and his entourage passed. Aside from a grip-and-grin photo op with Trump at a New York City fundraiser in 1988, the same year Bush roundly rejected Trump’s unsolicited overture to be considered as Bush’s running mate when it was brought to him by Lee Atwater, it was the only time Bush found himself in the orbit of Donald Trump. No such luck for Jeb Bush, for whom Donald Trump would become a political gadfly twenty-seven years later.
After Barack Obama’s decisive 2012 reelection victory against GOP challenger Mitt Romney, pundits began looking ahead at the political landscape in the next presidential election with the prospect of a matchup between the Bush and Clinton political dynasties—Jeb Bush going head-to-head with Hillary Clinton—a familial reprise of the ’92 presidential campaign. Both Jeb and Clinton were logical establishment candidates, the former boasting two solid terms as Florida governor, a high policy profile on issues like immigration and school choice, and a reliably conservative record. “[Jeb Bush] is going to be a very effective candidate if he runs,” surmised Charlie Black, a Republican lobbyist, reflecting the views of untold members of the GOP establishment, “because he is going to talk about the future without backing down or pandering to the Tea Party side.” But Jeb, who had said he would run only if he could do so with “joy” in his heart, was on the fence about a campaign for the White House. Part of his concern was the zeitgeist. “I think our politics is a mirror of our culture,” he said astutely in 2014, portending the challenges he would face. “It’s us. And what we are today is less humble, more arrogant, more coarse, more vulgar, more accepting of crap. We’ve moved down this slow slide. Politics is more like ‘The Kardashians.’”
His parents were split on the matter of him mounting a challenge for the presidency, with his father strongly in favor and his mother declaring on the Today show in 2013, “We’ve had enough Bushes.” George W. aligned with his father. Hillary Clinton would set a precedent for a dynastic choice. “What’s the difference if it’s Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Clinton,” George W. asked rhetorically of presidential succession, “or Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Bush?” Still, while George W. hoped Jeb would run, he didn’t pretend to know his brother’s intentions on a presidential bid, nor did he expect Jeb would consult him. Jeb had been loyal to his brother even when members of their own party turned their backs on 43. “Till death do us part,” he told CNN in 2010. But it didn’t mean the brothers were political confidants.
Surveying the field of GOP “would-be’s,” in early 2015, 43 said he was impressed by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whom he felt to be underrated, and was complimentary of Kentucky senator Rand Paul, whom he characterized as “interesting” and far more thoughtful than the Tea Party extremists. He believed that Paul Ryan was “too stiff” to be a successful national candidate, adding, “That’s one guy you won’t find farting on Air Force One.” But there was no doubt in his mind that his brother would be the best candidate for the party, and the best president for the nation.
After much hemming and hawing, Jeb quietly decided over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014 in Mexico with Columba and their three children, George P., Noelle, and Jeb Jr., that he would make a go of the presidency. In the months afterward, the Bush machine, dormant since the aughts, went into overdrive. Barbara Bush, retracting her initial pronouncement said, “What do you mean there are too many Bushes, I changed my mind.” Later she elaborated. “I thought that in a country this size, if we couldn’t find more than three families . . .” she said. “But now I’ve decided that, truthfully, we need him. We need someone who doesn’t think compromise is a dirty word; we need someone who isn’t flip-floppable; we need someone who immediately will talk to Democrats and Republicans.” The smart money went with Jeb, who seemed to have every advantage. Eventually, his campaign would amass a war chest of $150 million. In any other year all that may have been enough.
Jeb made his candidacy official on June 15, 2015, stating at a Miami rally that the country was “on a bad course,” and pledging to “campaign as I would serve, going everywhere, speaking to everyone, keeping my word, facing the issues without flinching, and staying true to what I believe.” He continued, “I will take nothing and no one for granted. I will run with my heart. I will run to win.”
The following day, on June 16, Donald Trump glided down the shiny escalator of Manhattan’s gilded sixty-eight-floor Trump Tower with his wife, Melania, to declare his own intentions to seek the presidency. He said nothing about his heart but, like Bush, was taking nothing for granted. Less a rally than a rant, Trump set the tone for his populist campaign. “Our country is in serious trouble,” he said, positioning himself—a successful, rich outsider who owed nothing to a broken, impotent Washington—as the only one who could fix it. His decidedly dystopian view heaped blame on foreign influences, necessitating mass deportation, bans on Muslim immigration, and shutting down mosques. In the speech’s most indelible line, Trump called many Mexican immigrants “rapists,” adding as an aside, “And some, I assume, are good people.” He promised to remedy illegal Mexican immigration by building “a great, great wall on our southern border.” The kicker was that Mexico would pay for it.
The speech raised hackles. Citing his “derogatory statements” regarding immigrants, NBC—the network behind Trump’s high-rated reality game show, The Apprentice, which debuted in 2004—ended its “business relationship” with Trump later the same month. Nonetheless, Trump, due largely to his fame from the hit show, entered the race with unmatched name recognition and by July 1, yielded 12 percent of likely Republican voters to Jeb’s 19 percent in a CNN/OCR poll, with other candidates, including Florida senator and one-time Jeb protégé Marco Rubio, Texas senator Ted Cruz, brain surgeon Ben Carson, and Chris Christie pulling single digits.
But as the election cycle played out, Trump continued to gain traction, tapping into a raw nerve of anger that permeated much of forgotten America. By turns channeling circus showman P. T. Barnum, professional wrestler Gorgeous George, and ruthless political-fixer and one-time Trump mentor Roy Cohn, Trump inexplicably dominated the news coverage. George H. W. Bush had surged ahead in the 1988 GOP primaries when his chief rival, Bob Dole, uncivilly snarled that Bush should “stop lying” about his record. But none of the traditional rules of politics seemed to apply to the New York billionaire. Trump’s offhand and off-the-wall hyperbole and tweets frequently had Republicans slapping their heads and Democrats slapping their knees, though it didn’t seem to matter; Trump hurled invective with relative impunity, saying of John McCain, a revered Vietnam POW, “He’s not a war hero because he was captured,” and of Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, after she aggressively moderated a GOP debate, she “had blood coming out of her eyes, out of her wherever.” At a campaign rally in January, he proclaimed, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” words that themselves might have sunk candidates in other times but that figuratively captured Trump’s ostensible invulnerability. Yet his antics were a boon for the struggling news media outlets. By March, he had yielded an estimated $2 billion in free media.
Trump’s attacks against Jeb were especially damaging. During a series of GOP debates in the fall, his characterization of Jeb as “low energy” hit home. Suddenly, Jeb’s own campaign slogan—“Jeb!”—mocked him. His father’s son, Jeb had obeyed the rules and behaved civilly—decorum, along with his wonkishness, that seemed woefully out of fashion. When he did hit back, as he did in a mid-December debate, claiming that Trump’s ban on all Muslims would preclude a coalition to destroy ISIS and presciently warning that Trump “is a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president,” his blows wreaked little havoc; Trump’s eye-rolling reactions got just as much attention, his reality-star wattage blinding not only Bush but the other candidates as well.
By the time primary season heated up in January, polls showed Jeb relegated to the field’s also-rans as Trump surged to the top of the heap trailed by Cruz and Rubio. The January Iowa caucuses later the same month gave Cruz 37 percent of the vote over Trump’s 35 percent, as Jeb limped in with under 3 percent. Jeb did a little better in the New Hampshire primary in early February, reaping 11 percent of the vote—with Trump topping the field with 33 percent—though his fourth place showing wasn’t enough to reflect a momentum shift in his campaign. The South Carolina primary, on February 20, became do or die for Jeb. Pulling out all the stops, he tapped his older brother in Texas to stump with him.
The call came as a last resort. Jeb struggled to be his own man in the campaign, but just as 41’s legacy had hovered over George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000, George W. shadowed his brother in 2016. Torn by fraternal loyalty and political practicality, Jeb had stumbled awkwardly over the issue of the war in Iraq early in the contest before categorically distancing himself from his brother’s decision by stating, “Knowing what we know now . . . I would not have gone into Iraq.” Regardless of the war’s toxicity, 43 remained popular in South Carolina, which had saved his own campaign in 2000 and was where Jeb hoped his brother might have a rub-off effect on him.
To that point, 43 had respectfully kept his distance in his brother’s campaign, limiting his involvement to appearing at fundraisers for his brother and calling him “a couple of times” with the names of potential supporters who expressed interest in helping him. But now, a few days before the primary, the former president, Laura by his side, was happy to do his part, speaking ebulliently on Jeb’s behalf for twenty minutes at a North Charleston rally. “These are tough times,” he said.
And I understand that Americans are angry and frustrated. But we do not need someone in the Oval Office who mirrors and inflames our anger and frustration. We need someone who can fix the problems that cause their anger and frustration, and that’s Jeb Bush.
The event proved a double-edged sword for Jeb, pulling in a crowd of three thousand, far larger than he had seen in earlier stops, but highlighting his own contrast with his brother. As one attendee, buying into Trump’s characterization of Jeb, put it, “I’m a big W. fan . . . Jeb would be fine, if he could get some energy.”
Trump seemed to relish taking on not only Jeb in the campaign but also George W., who Trump had implied was responsible for 9/11 and suggested should be impeached for sending troops to Iraq. During a South Carolina debate, just prior to George W.’s campaign appearance, Trump had railed against 43’s administration, claiming, “They lied. They said that there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none, and they knew there were none.” Jeb rose passionately to his brother’s defense. “While Donald Trump was busy building a reality-TV show,” he responded, “my brother was busy building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I’m proud of what he did.” Still, Jeb’s more forceful debate performance, along with his brother’s campaign reinforcement, was too little, too late. Trump took the primary with ease, earning 33 percent of the vote, with Bush distantly tying for fourth place with just 8 percent.
The writing on the wall, Jeb pulled out of the race after the results came in. “In this campaign, I have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds,” he said in an emotional address to supporters. The same winds blustered Trump on to secure the Republican nomination. He accepted the party’s bid at the GOP National Convention, held in Cleveland, where the Bush family was conspicuously absent.
Forty-one was stung by his son’s defeat, just as he had been after Jeb’s failed gubernatorial effort in 1994. He rejected the notion that it was due to “too many Bushes,” attributing it instead to “timing.” “I think he would’ve been the best president if elected,” he said. “So, it was a personal disappointment. He went all out. He did everything he could do. It just wasn’t meant to be.”
Forty-three believed Trump’s success at his brother’s expense was fueled by the anger resulting from a moribund economy. The reality star’s antiestablishment fury better fit the country’s mood, trumping his brother’s conservative ideas, he believed. “You can either exploit the anger [and] incite it,” he said, “or you can come up with ideas to deal with it. [Jeb] came up with solutions . . . but it didn’t fit with the mood . . . If you’re angry with the powers that be, you’re angry with the so-called establishment, and there’s nothing more established than having a father and brother that have been president.” As for whether Jeb could have done anything in his campaign differently, 43 replied, “I don’t know . . . It’s hard to tell.”
The antiestablishment rage Trump fomented, an indictment of the very party that had made him its standard-bearer, raised the question, Was Trump a Republican? In 2016, conservative analyst and journalist William Kristol, invoking conservative icon William F. Buckley, wrote in the National Review, “Hasn’t Donald Trump been a votary merely of wealth rather than freedom? Hasn’t he been animated in the art of the deal rather than the art of self-government? . . . Isn’t Trump a two-bit Caesarism of a kind that American conservatives have always disdained? Isn’t the task of conservatives today to stand athwart Trumpism, yelling Stop?” If so, Trump yelled louder. The GOP, long in disarray and absent a definitive, unifying doctrine beyond opposition to Barack Obama, was ripe for insurgency.
At a reunion of aides from his administration in Dallas, George W. Bush said privately, “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president.” It was a legitimate concern. Modern Republicanism, at its best, was rooted in America’s engagement in the world, enhancing its international power and prestige through its leadership role by fostering greater openness and human freedom, and representing the essence of opportunity and democratic ideals. It was epitomized in Nixon’s historic opening of China in 1972, his most important foreign-policy achievement, and in Reagan’s overriding quest to wipe out Soviet oppression. Reagan’s most resonant oration was delivered at the Berlin Wall’s Brandenburg Gate in 1987, when he demanded of his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” America stood for knocking walls down, not building them.
The Bushes continued the tradition, as 41, driven by humanitarian concern and economic interests, led the charge to drive Iraqi captors out of Kuwait, and to catalyze the reunification of Germany as a democratic stronghold despite European opposition. Like his father and Reagan, 43 saw the U.S. as a “force for good.” Even after 9/11, 43—while enacting security measures many considered extraconstitutional—declined to take the political path of least resistance by yielding to xenophobia, instead visiting a mosque, proclaiming, “Islam is peace,” and later pushing for progressive changes in immigration policy. Though the war in Iraq was ill-founded and lacked a clear nation-building strategy, its intent, in addition to better ensuring national security, was a Wilsonian push to promulgate democracy.
Well before the 2016 election cycle began, 43 expressed disquiet about the country’s growing isolationism and protectionism as “twins of negativity.” In 2010, he said, “I worry about a nation withdrawing and saying, ‘It’s too hard. Let’s forget what’s going on over there.’ I also worry about protectionists, which is another way of saying less competition, less trade around the world.” By 2016, Bush was reminded of the “America First” movement waged by Charles Lindbergh to keep America out of World War II; the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which put stiff tariffs on imported goods and exacerbated the Depression; and the National Origins Act of 1924, which placed rigid quotas on non–Western European countries. “Those sentiments are alive again,” he lamented.
He had similar concerns about his party’s presidential nominee, who fanned the flames of nativism. When Trump entered the 2016 race, Bush thought, Interesting; won’t last. After Trump emerged as the GOP’s lead candidate, 43 was as surprised as anyone else. “When you’re not out there and you’re not with the people, you don’t get a good sense of [the mood],” he said. But his reservations about the candidate took hold. When asked what people should look for in a president, Bush often replied, “humility,” a virtue that he believed should include “recognizing your limitations and surrounding yourself with people who know what you don’t know.” When Trump said, “I’m my own adviser,” Bush thought, Wow, this guy really doesn’t understand the job of president. Bush also saw as a poor sign Trump’s inability to “poke fun” at himself. “As you know from looking at my family,” he continued, “[humility] is a certain heritage, that’s what they expect, and we’re not seeing that [in Trump].”
Indeed, his father did expect humility in American leadership—and he didn’t see it in Trump, either. “I don’t like him,” George H. W. Bush said bluntly of Trump in May 2016, after Trump had become the party’s presumptive nominee. “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.” When asked what he thought Trump was seeking in running for the presidency, it wasn’t Trump’s desire to serve that Bush cited, as it had been for him and members of his family, but that Trump had “a certain ego.” Could Trump unite the country if elected? “Yes,” 41 replied, but it would require “humility,” making it a greater challenge for Trump. Asked in the same sitting whom he would vote for in a matchup between Trump and Hillary Clinton, he responded, “I think I’d probably be for Hillary over Trump, if that was the choice,” a vote he confirmed after Election Day. “I’m just down on Trump.”
The Bushes’ resistance to Trump was no great surprise. During the height of the Watergate scandal, in the letter to his sons that George W. said set a political “standard” for him and Jeb, 41 warned presciently, “Power accompanied by arrogance is very dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous when men with no real experience have it—for they can abuse our great institutions.”
Forty-three, however, wasn’t much more enthusiastic about Clinton. Less than a month before the election, he stated, “The question for the country to decide—on both candidates, by the way—is to what extent should we be insisting upon integrity and solid character.” While he “knew nothing” about Trump before he threw his hat in the ring in 2015, 43 had spent some time with Clinton. “In my presence, she was polite . . . thoughtful,” he said, but alluding to her using a private email server as secretary of state, he added, “obviously tangled up in bad judgment. This email thing, putting confidential information out there in a world where all kinds of people can figure out how to get your emails was not good judgment.” It was, he said understatedly, “a strange election year,” in which both candidates were “among the few in the country” who made each other “viable.” Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton would earn the vote of the forty-third president. As he said later, “I voted ‘None of the Above’ for president, and Republican down ballot in 2016.”
When the votes were tallied on Election Day, Americans, many holding their noses, gave the popular vote to Clinton by 2.9 million ballots, but handed the presidency to Trump, who took 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227. With one guerilla campaign and a trail of scorched earth, Trump had felled two political dynasties—the Bushes and the Clintons. It was a different world. And, for the moment at least, it was Trump’s world.