Bush Sr voted against Trump
FORMER US president George HW Bush voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and called Donald Trump a “blowhard” who was driven by “a certain ego”.
His son George W Bush left his ballot blank and said of Mr Trump: “This guy doesn’t know what it means to be president.”
The revelations, contained in historian Mark Updegrove’s The Last Republicans, available in bookstores later this month, represent the strongest criticism to date from the Bush clan on why their Republican successor is uniquely unfit to hold office.
“I don’t like him,” the elder Bush told Updegrove in May 2016 before the elections in November of that year, according to excerpts from the book.
“I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s a blowhard. And I’m not too excited about him being (our) leader.”
While travelling to Tokyo on Air Force One at the weekend, Mr Trump walked back to the press cabin and responded to the criticism.
“I don’t need headlines. I don’t want to make their move successful,” he said.
The younger Bush was sceptical about then-candidate Trump’s chances in a race in which his younger brother Jeb was an early favourite.
Once the bombastic billionaire real estate magnate secured the Republican nomination, Mr Bush worried about Mr Trump’s lack of humility, and thus his inability to recognise his own limitations and surround himself with more knowledgeable people.
After Mr Trump said, “I’m my own adviser,” Bush quipped: “Wow, this guy really doesn’t understand the job of president.”
The comments are sure to escalate a long-running feud and come after George W Bush gave a speech last month that condemned bigotry, bullying
I DON’T LIKE HIM. I DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HIM, BUT I KNOW HE’S A BLOWHARD GEORGE H.W. BUSH
and lies in US politics, in what was widely seen as a broadside against Mr Trump even though the president was not mentioned by name.
The book’s title was inspired by the younger Bush’s concerns that he had been “the last Republican president” because Mr Trump represented a major break from traditional conservatism.
A White House official hit back, telling CNN: “If one presidential candidate can disassemble a political party, it speaks volumes about how strong a legacy its past two presidents really had.
“And that begins with the Iraq war, one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history.”