Bush’s stamp endures even if alliances he built are frayed
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Former President George H.W. Bush’s legacy was on display just hours before his death. President Donald Trump signed a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that was the next generation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Bush first negotiated nearly three decades ago.
As Trump scrawled his name on the document Friday, however, he chose not to frame the accord as building on Bush’s accomplishment, but as tearing it down. Rather than the natural update of NAFTA, he characterized it as the replacement for a disastrous agreement. “The terrible NAFTA will soon be gone,” he declared on Twitter.
If ever there was a moment when it was clear that Bush’s America has given way to Trump’s America, this is it. Bush’s death at age 94 is the end of an era — the passing of the last of the World War II and Cold War generation to serve as president, as well as the fading of an approach to public life overtaken by the politics of anger, grievance and polarization.
Yet however much he wants to dismantle it, Trump is still operating within the framework that Bush helped establish. While he disparaged NAFTA, Trump ultimately accepted Bush’s fundamental concept of knitting together the three great nations of North America in a single, integrated trade bloc. The alliances that Bush built and bolstered remain in place, however frayed. And a host of civil rights, environmental and other Bush-era laws still govern America. “He was a very fine man. I met him on a number of occasions,” Trump, who was in Buenos Aires meeting with world leaders, told reporters shortly after calling former President George W. Bush and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida to offer condolences. “He was a terrific guy, and he’ll be missed. He lived a full life and an exemplary life.”
His words of admiration belied a history of animosity with the Bush family. Trump eviscerated Jeb Bush during the 2016 Republican primaries and regularly disparaged George W. Bush. The elder Bush refused to support Trump in the fall election, voting instead for Hillary Clinton. The younger George Bush has said he voted for none of the above.
George Herbert Walker Bush led the country and the world through a hinge point in history as decades of superpower rivalry came to a close in a remarkably peaceful way and the United States emerged as the dominant force on the planet. With the reunification of Germany, he helped redraw the map of Europe, and he set in motion a drastic reduction in the world’s largest nuclear arsenals.
His foray into the Middle East successfully ousted Iraq from Kuwait but entangled the United States in the region in a way that would later prove disastrous when George W. Bush sent troops to Baghdad. And his broken “read my lips” promise not to raise taxes and his inability to hold off a recession spelled his political doom as voters rejected him for a second term in 1992.
Arguably, that moment proved a precursor to this one as conservatives angry at his apostasy, led by a onetime backbench congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich, rose to power within the Republican Party and toppled the old establishment. The harder-edged Gingrich revolution in some ways foreshadowed Trump’s extraordinary takeover of the party.
“Bush was truly the last of a kind of president,” said Jon Meacham, who spent much time with the former president while writing Destiny and Power, his definitive biography of the 41st president. “He had more in common culturally with FDR and Eisenhower than he did with Clinton and Obama.”
Meacham said the current world of cable talk and relentless partisanship took shape during Bush’s era. “He saw it all coming, and he didn’t like it,” he said.
Mark K. Updegrove, author of The Last Republicans, about the two Bush presidencies, said, “In so many ways, Bush was the antithesis of the Republican leadership we see today.” He embodied, Updegrove added, “the humility, civility and selfsacrifice of the best of the World War II generation. He played tough but fair, making friends on both sides of the aisle and rejecting the notion of politics as a zero-sum game.”
For all of the condolences and tributes pouring in to the Bush home in Houston from every corner of the world on Saturday, Trump’s very presidency stands as a rebuke to Bush. Never a proponent of “kinder and gentler” politics, Trump prefers a brawl, even with his own party. The “new world order” of free-trade, alliance-building internationalism that Bush championed has been replaced by Trump’s “America First” defiance of globalism.
In effect, Trump has demonstrated that he sees the go-along-to-get-along style that defined Bush’s presidency as inadequate to advance the nation in a hostile world. Gentility and dignity, hallmarks of Bush, are signs of weakness to Trump. In his view, Bush’s version of leadership left the United States exploited by allies and adversaries, whether on economics or security.
Trump reflected on none of that out loud in the early hours after Bush’s death, authorizing the release of gracious written statements and canceling a news conference to end his trip to Buenos Aires as a gesture of respect.
“President George H.W. Bush led a long, successful and beautiful life,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning. “Whenever I was with him I saw his absolute joy for life and true pride in his family. His accomplishments were great from beginning to end. He was a truly wonderful man and will be missed by all!”
While many wondered whether he would attend the funeral, given his history of animosity with the Bush family, the White House confirmed that he will. Trump designated Wednesday as a national day of mourning and planned to participate in services at the Washington National Cathedral.
Sen. John McCain, another stalwart of a past Republican generation, made a point of excluding Trump from his funeral in September, but the elder Bush was known for New England propriety and evidently did not want to break with tradition.
Trump was never as harsh publicly about the patriarch of the Bush family as he was about its other members, but more than once in recent months, he mocked a famous phrase from the former president’s 1989 inaugural address, “a thousand points of light,” which Bush used to describe Americans coming together as volunteers to improve their communities and their country.
“What the hell was that, by the way, thousand points of light?” Trump asked scornfully at a campaign rally in Great Falls, Mont., in July. “What did that mean? Does anyone know? I know one thing: Make America great again, we understand. Putting America first, we understand. Thousand points of light, I never quite got that one.”
For his part, Bush was never impressed by Trump. The two had only passing encounters over the years. In 1988, when Bush was seeking the presidency, Trump offered himself as a running mate. Bush never took the idea seriously, deeming it “strange and unbelievable,” according to Destiny and Power, Meacham’s biography.
“I don’t like him,” Bush told Updegrove in May 2016. “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.” Rather than being motivated by public service, Bush said, Trump seemed to be driven by “a certain ego.”
But the younger Bush recognized that Trump was at the forefront of change. “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president,” he told Updegrove.
The current president sought to put that history aside Saturday, even citing Bush’s “thousand points of light” in the written statement that he authorized aides to release in the immediate hours after the former president’s death.
“President Bush inspired generations of his fellow Americans to public service — to be, in his words, ‘a thousand points of light’ illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world,” the statement said.