MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell this week slammed former Republican president George W. Bush for refusing to intervene in the looming US presidential election.
“Any decent human being would just want him to say, ‘You shouldn’t vote for Donald Trump, and here’s why,’ and he doesn’t even do that,” O’Donnell said of the Republican president who served from 2001 to 2009 on the Fast Politics podcast.
At a time when many warn that US democracy is under threat from Trump’s sympathies for authoritarianism, Bush and other Republican leaders of his era seem increasingly alone as they continue to refuse to take sides in the election.
Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, and his daughter, Liz Cheney, who lost her Wyoming congressional seat in a committee action on Jan. 6, have endorsed Kamala Harris. So have senior Republican officials, including more than 100 lawmakers who signed a letter this week declaring that Trump, who is the party’s nominee for a third term, should never return to the White House.
“We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, noble and stable leader,” the official said. “While we will disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, we believe she has the qualities necessary to be president that Donald Trump does not.”
Among the big name signatories are former Senator and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, former CIA and NSA Director General Michael Hayden, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte, and former President Bush and his longtime aide, Robert Zoellick, who served as deputy to Secretary of State James Baker in the first Bush administration.
But absent from the list were Baker, former President Bush and former Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, three Republican officials who are presumably not opposing Trump in this election, and the absence of comments from Bush, Rice and Baker has prompted comment.
Bush’s office recently said he would not endorse a successor because he “retired from presidential politics years ago.” Perhaps his most memorable comments about his successor will be those he allegedly made on the Capitol podium after Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech, when he said things like “American carnage” and “that was weird.”
Rice opposed Trump in 2016. In the wake of the “Access Hollywood” scandal, in which Trump bragged about sexual assault, Rice argued that Trump should withdraw from the Republican ticket and support “someone with the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth.”
She has also commented on President Trump. In 2021, she said his appeal to people who feel let down by establishment politicians is “probably something we still really need to pay attention to.” Earlier this year, Rice spoke out against isolationism, another central tenet of Trumpism, but that was rebuked by former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who sat with Cheney on the committee on Jan. 6 and endorsed Harris at the Democratic National Convention.
“It’s time to speak up and do more,” Kinzinger said. “You’re not fighting ‘isolationism,’ you’re fighting Trump. And you need to say it out loud: Republicans, stop being neutral. You’re either for Trump or you’re against Trump. Pick a side.”
Baker has not publicly taken a stance on Trump, but his biographers reported in 2020 that “while the myriad ethics scandals surrounding Trump were dizzying, Baker convinced himself that getting conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation was worth it.”
“I will vote Republican,” Baker was quoted as saying. “I really will.”
Baker, now 94 and still in public office, hasn’t said publicly how he’ll vote this year. Sources close to him say he was a vocal critic of Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Still, his words in the book are resonant.
“I’m not leaving the party. You could say the party has left me because the party leader has left me. But I think it’s important to look at the bigger picture.”
But in the eyes of most, the picture is increasingly alarming: Trump incited a deadly attack on the Capitol and then avoided a second impeachment that stemmed from that attack, was convicted on 34 criminal charges with more than 50 pending, ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil lawsuits for business fraud and in a defamation lawsuit stemming from a rape allegation that a judge called “substantially true,” and launched a campaign of breathtakingly racist epithets and lies.
“TThe axe will be raised, taxes will be lowered. Regulations will be imposed and lifted. But democracy? Don’t let it go to waste. Our reputation in the world, our NATO alliance in times of extreme crisis, once lost, will be extremely hard to rebuild.”
That’s the opinion of a Washington Republican who served as a senior White House official under former presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, whose job does not allow him to publicly endorse anyone, said on condition of anonymity that he would be open about voting for Harris.
The former official laughingly suggested that George W. Bush “might endorse Condrey Rice again,” a reference to the protest vote that Bush reportedly filed in 2020 instead of endorsing Joe Biden.
Of Baker, the former official said, “Don’t forget, he’s from Houston, and you think spending 50 years in Houston gives you an insight into the oil and gas world. A lot of people in the oil and gas industry are very opposed to Biden and Harris, mainly because the perception is that Biden supported the Green New Deal, which is false, and he also supported a review of natural gas exports.”
The former official said it’s easier for Republicans to oppose Trump on the realm of national security and so-called democracy, given his election interference, his loss in the Jan. 6 election and unsettling questions about his ties to dictators including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“You have people like Dick Cheney out there who are basically saying, ‘This is about democracy. This is about January 6th. We cannot entrust Donald Trump with power.’ In Cheney’s case, I think this goes back to his tenure at the Pentagon (under George H.W. Bush). If you look back at the op-ed written by every living secretary of defense on January 3, 2021, you’ll see that it all comes from there.”
The Washington Post column urged Americans to ensure a peaceful transition of power. Three days later, Trump ensured that didn’t happen.
The former official continued, “There are many moderate Republicans who support Harris, but I don’t see this as an ideological thing. I see this as an attempt to stop Trump first and then rebuild the party.”
Those ambitions may also influence mainstream Republicans who have chosen to back Trump, including New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who ran against him in the primary, all of whom may be looking to a “post-Trump” world: 2024 if he loses, or 2028 if he wins.
If so, that may not be a wise move, a former White House official suggested.
“I think it’s going to be very difficult to rebuild the party, mainly because Trump supporters control almost all of the states and state parties.”
“But it’s a generational challenge, and I think that in the near future even more moderate figures will be forced to agree with the direction of Trumpism.”