George W Bush called the Republican Party under Donald Trump “isolationist, protectionist and … nativist” – a judgment that the former US president is unlikely to make new friends on the American right.
Bush, who is promoting a new book, spoke to NBC on Tuesday.
Asked to describe his party’s position under Trump – who lost the Oval Office after one term but maintained a firm grip on his party’s base, Bush said: “I would describe it as isolationist, protectionist. and to some extent nativist.
“It’s not exactly my vision as an old guy, but I’m just a guy placed on the pasture.”
Bush’s book is called Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants. He told NBC that the country that contains Latin for its kicker, E Pluribus Unum, was a beautiful country … and yet it is not nice when we condemn, name people and scare people about immigration.
Trump continues to do so, calling on his successor, Joe Biden, to restore his draconian policies while followers on the far right of the party form an ‘America First Caucus’ based on’ Anglo- Saxon political traditions’ discussed.
Bush, the son of another president, comes from a political dynasty about as wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) as possible. But Trump brutally took down former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the former president’s younger brother, in 2016.
George W Bush maintains friendly relations with former presidents, including Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and for some, a more reasonable face has come from Republican politics.
Others warn that progressive people should not think too lovingly of a man whose time in office includes the invasion of Iraq and the mixed federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
“I hope it will be a bit of a push back against this, because I think it’s an absolute scandal that humans need to be rehabilitated and become progressive in any way,” Jackson Lears, a cultural historian, told the Guardian this week.