Names and faces
■ Former President George W. Bush says the Republican Party he once served as leader has become “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist” and says he’s especially concerned about anti-immigration rhetoric.
“It’s a beautiful country we have and yet it’s not beautiful when we condemn, call people names and scare people about immigration,” Bush told NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday. Bush, who was in New York to preside over a naturalization ceremony, said his new book, “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants,” aims to “elevate the discourse.” The former president did not mention Donald Trump, who aggressively curbed both legal and illegal immigration during his tenure and sought to build a “big, beautiful wall” at the southwest border with Mexico to keep out migrants. Trump, a fellow Republican, disparaged the migrants as invaders and “illegal aliens” and, as a candidate, referred to Mexicans as “rapists.” But Trump has dominated the Republican Party, even out of office. Hard-right House Republicans last week discussed forming an America First Caucus, which one document described as championing “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and warning that mass immigration was putting the “unique identity” of the U.S. at risk. Bush, asked to describe the state of the party, replied, “I would describe it as isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist.” He added, “It’s not exactly my vision as an old guy, but I’m just an old guy that’s put out to pasture.”
■ Rocker Ted Nugent has revealed that he was in physical agony after testing positive for coronavirus — months after he said the virus was “not a real pandemic.” “I thought I was dying,” Nugent says in a Facebook live video posted Monday. “I literally could hardly crawl out of bed the last few days,” adding: “So I was officially tested positive for COVID-19 today.” In the video, shot at his Michigan ranch, the “Cat Scratch Fever” singer repeatedly uses racist slurs to refer to covid-19 and reiterates his previous stance that he wouldn’t be getting the vaccine because he claims wrongly that “nobody knows what’s in it.” Nugent, a supporter of ex-President Donald Trump, has previously called the pandemic a scam and has railed against public health restrictions. He has also repeated a narrative pushed by conservative media and disputed by health experts that suggests the official death count from the coronavirus is inflated. A poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in late March found that 36% of Republicans said they will probably or definitely not get vaccinated, compared with 12% of Democrats. The seven-day national average of cases remains over 60,000 new infections per day.