The escalating feud between president Donald Trump and former President George W. Bush and his father Geoge HW Bush took an ugly turn Saturday after both men slammed Trump in interviews and revealed they refused to vote for him in the 2016 presidential election.
In response, the White House disparaged the legacies of the only two living Republican presidents, the Washington Post reports.
NEW: WH responds to Bush41 calling POTUS a "blowhard". Calls Iraq "greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history". via/ @NoahGrayCNN pic.twitter.com/XQ2f1JK81C
— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 4, 2017
“If one Presidential candidate can disassemble a political party, it speaks volumes about how strong a legacy its past two presidents really had,” the White House wrote to CNN following the network’s report on Bushs’ comments. The White House also called the younger Bush’s decision to wage war on Iraq “one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history.”
Former president George H.W. Bush mocked Trump as a “blowhard” and revealed he voted for a Democratic president, while the younger Bush worried aloud that Trump would destroy the idea of a Republican president in all but name, according to “The Last Republicans,” which is scheduled to go on sale later this month.
It’s rare in the modern political era for former presidents to openly criticize their successors. But these are not ordinary times.
Despite such reservations by the Bushes and other establishment Republicans, Trump, who has made more than 1,300 false or misleading claims in less than a year and almost constantly insults his many rivals.
After seeing Trump’s nasty campaign, George Bush W. feared he would “be the last Republican president,” CNN reports.
“And it wasn’t just about Hillary Clinton becoming president,” the report said. “It was because Donald Trump represented everything that the Bushes abhorred.”
“Trump stood for rudeness, international isolationism and weak leadership in the eyes of the Bushes,” Bush said, according to CNN.
Bush gave a speech last month, in which he lamented these same vices and politics that “seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.”
“Not the America I know,” Bush said.
