Ex-presidents breaking ranks to rankle Trump
Obama, Bush each take loosely veiled shots at Trump
WASHINGTON — Former presidents are shedding a traditional reluctance to criticize their successors, unleashing pointed attacks on the Trump White House and the commander in chief — but without mentioning him by name.
Remarks on the same day by former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama raise the prospect more dissenters will follow in defiance of President Donald Trump.
“What they are doing is laying down a marker for acceptable public discourse,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t stand for that kind of language and behaviour. These are our values, these are our principles.”’
Bush and Obama were preceded by other prominent figures. In recent weeks, Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Arizonans John McCain and Jeff Flake have taken swipes at a president who has pushed the limits of polite political discourse and has seemed to relish public fights over sensitive subjects, including war, race, immigrants and, this week, the war dead.
Bush this week delivered a speech remarkable for its takedowns of key features of the political movement that put Trump in power.
“Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children,” he said in New York.
Never a fan of Trump’s, Bush drew his biggest applause with this line: “The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.”
Three hundred miles to the south, Obama, a Democrat, used a similar approach to denounce Trump.
“Why are we deliberately trying to misunderstand each other and be cruel to each other and put each other down? That’s not who we are,” he said during a political appearance in Richmond, Virginia.
At the White House on Friday, presidential spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the administration believes the former presidents’ remarks “were not directed towards the president.”
Trump said Friday he does not believe feuding with Republican senators could get in the way of his agenda for tax cuts and health care.
“Sometimes it gets people to do what they’re supposed to be doing,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network.
However coincidental, Bush and Obama’s comments capped periods of reticence for both men during Trump’s tumultuous first months in office. Neither mentioned Trump’s name, but the pair left no doubt who they were talking about. Trump has pursued a ban on Muslim immigration, feuded with disabled Americans, hurricane victims and Gold Star parents and bestowed belittling nicknames on critics — including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Bush’s brother, during the 2016 GOP primary.
To be sure, there remains a long slate of Cabinet members and lawmakers who try not to cross Trump in public — from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to most of the Senate Republican caucus.
Then there’s Tillerson, who reportedly called the president “a moron.” Tillerson tried to patch things up in an extraordinary press conference in which he described Trump as “smart” and is insisting his relationship with the president is strong. But though a Tillerson aide denied Tillerson had called Trump a moron, the secretary of state himself never has.