Amid
the balloons and parties, speeches and spectacle, one faction of the
Republican Party will be almost invisible at the national convention
this week: the Bush family network.
Representatives
of the last Republican White House are effectively in exile from
presidential politics these days, dispirited by their party’s embrace of
Donald J. Trump, the presumptive nominee, and feeling betrayed by former friends who are backing him.
When Mr. Trump is nominated, former President George W. Bush
will be on his Crawford, Tex., ranch, painting and bike riding. His
former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will be in her Stanford
University office working on a new book about democracy, and former Gov.
Jeb Bush of Florida will, he wrote in a terse email, be “working in Miami.”
They
are hardly the only ones staying away. An email sent to alumni of Mr.
Bush’s administration this month listing those former Bush officials
going to Cleveland was notable mostly because of who was not included:
no former cabinet officials or members of the White House senior staff.
The former president, who turned 70 this month, has taken a vow of silence about Mr. Trump
in public. But he and his longtime loyalists are confounded about what
has happened in their party, and by how little appeal the Bush brand of
politics carries these days.
“I’m
very fearful for my republic,” said Marc Racicot, the former Montana
governor who was chairman of Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign and of the
Republican National Committee. “I thought my fellow citizens would
exercise the judgment to steer the country in the right direction.”
Carlos
Gutierrez, who served as commerce secretary to Mr. Bush, said in a
telephone interview, “People are puzzled by what happened, wondering how
did we let this happen.”
Addressing
a few hundred Republican donors clad in blazers and polo shirts at a
fund-raiser for Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri outside St. Louis last
month, Mr. Bush did not mention Mr. Trump by name but issued an
unmistakable warning about the dangers of Mr. Trump’s politics.
“He said he was concerned about three isms: protectionism,
isolationism and nativism,” recalled John C. Danforth, a former senator
and United Nations ambassador for Mr. Bush who attended the
$1,000-a-person dinner. “I think that said a lot.”
The departure represented by Mr. Trump is dramatic.
The presumptive nominee, who has electrified audiences with jeremiads against Hispanics and Muslims,
has disregarded the former president’s effort to create a durable
Republican majority by broadening the party’s appeal to accommodate a
rapidly changing country. He has even more thoroughly rejected Mr.
Bush’s worldview, scorning the interventionist and pro-free trade and
immigration policies that were at the heart of his two terms as
president.
And
with his penchant for cutting ridicule and crude insults, Mr. Trump
represents personal qualities that are the antithesis of Mr. Bush’s mix
of Christianity and old-money restraint.
“It
would be like if George Wallace had succeeded John F. Kennedy and the
New Frontiersmen,” said Peter Wehner, a senior official in Mr. Bush’s
White House.
But
as Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida learned in their failed
campaigns, there was little appetite in the Republican primary
electorate for a restoration of “compassionate conservatism” or anything
resembling the former president’s agenda. Voters wanted a more
hard-line approach.
“Our
party is changing,” said Matt Schlapp, who was White House political
director in Mr. Bush’s first term, pointing to rising concern over what
he called American “sovereignty.”
“People feel like they’ve lost the country,” Mr. Schlapp said of today’s Republican voters.
And many in Mr. Bush’s circle feel as though they have lost their party, at least for now.
Mr.
Bush addressed the 2008 convention by video (Hurricane Gustav was
bearing down on the Gulf Coast) and was featured alongside his father in
a brief video during the 2012 convention. But if neither John McCain
nor Mitt Romney, the last two Republican nominees, was eager to
highlight the unpopular Mr. Bush, there were still ample reminders of
him at their conventions.
Ms.
Rice, who worked in both Bush administrations, gave one of the
best-received prime-time speeches in 2012. And plenty of Mr. Bush’s
loyalists were at both conventions, either as advisers to Mr. McCain or
Mr. Romney, or because they always attended the party convention, which
served as an informal reunion for old friends and colleagues.
This
time, though, there will be no high-profile Bush veteran addressing the
delegates. The most prominent figure here from the administration will
probably be Karl Rove, who is attending both party conventions this year in his role as a Fox News commentator.
While
many in the Bush circle are discouraged about Mr. Trump, they are also
enjoying a bit of schadenfreude over the candidate’s struggles.
Over
breakfast with a handful of leading Republicans last month in New York,
Jeb Bush made clear he was still smarting over seeing his own presidential ambitions extinguished by Mr. Trump. “He seems low energy with the teleprompter,” Mr. Bush said, gleefully repurposing Mr. Trump’s favorite criticism of him, according to an attendee who requested anonymity to discuss a private event.
Mr.
Trump tormented not just Jeb Bush in the primary; he also assailed
George W. Bush in remarkably pointed terms, arguing that the Iraq war
was built on lies and that the former president had little national
security record to stand on because the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took
place on his watch. But the contempt Bush loyalists have for Mr. Trump
is driven by something deeper than his primary-season attacks.
Unlike
the last two presidential races, in which the Republican nominees were
largely aligned with Mr. Bush’s free-market worldview, this campaign may
have profound implications for the Bush legacy. Mr. Trump’s success —
or defeat — in the election would render a verdict on Mr. Bush’s
presidency and vision of conservatism.
“If
Donald Trump wins, he will, by definition, have created a new template
of success for Republicans,” said Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first White
House press secretary. “But if he loses, and particularly if he is
crushed, it will reset the party back more in the direction of President
Bush.”
Because
Mr. Trump represents something far greater in the eyes of the Bush
veterans than just an unfortunate party nominee, their determination to
defeat him has become more intense.
The
vast majority of the approximately three dozen veterans of Mr. Bush’s
administration contacted for this article indicated that they would not
cast a ballot for Mr. Trump.
“I
can count on one hand the number of people I worked with who are
supporting Trump,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former Bush State
Department official who has been calling his onetime colleagues to
solicit support for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
A
handful of high-level former Bush officials will support him. Most
prominent is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has indicated to
former colleagues that with his daughter on the Wyoming ballot for
Congress this year, he had little choice. That is an understandable
rationale to many in the Bush orbit.
But
there is far less charity offered to two other former Bush staff
members who have been outspoken on television and social media about
their support for Mr. Trump: Mr. Fleischer and Mr. Schlapp.
After Mr. Fleischer announced his support on Twitter for Mr. Trump in May, one of his former colleagues, Tony Fratto, responded: “Then we don’t have anything to say to each other.”
In
an interview, Mr. Fratto, who served in the Bush Treasury Department
and White House, was still angry. “You were the White House spokesperson
when Trump said the president lied the country into the death and
maiming of people unnecessarily,” he said of Mr. Fleischer. “How can Ari
be O.K. with that?”
Such a betrayal, Mr. Fratto said, was “unforgivable.”
Mr. Fleischer said he still considered Mr. Fratto a friend, but lamented that “Trump has split the party.”
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