If you think former President George W. Bush is Bush is some kind of champion for good government with his recent critique of President Donlad Trump, do contain your cheers, says Bulwark editor Jonathan Last.
“… [I]t was not a criticism of Trump, it was a whitewash,” said Last, insisting it was necessary to “go HAM” on Bush because “his foolishness is an insult to everyone trying to preserve liberal democracy in this moment.”
Last’s biggest problem is Bush’s claim that “the office of the president is more important than the occupant; that the institution of the presidency gives ballast to our ship of state. For that stability we are indebted to the wisdom of our founding fathers’ governing charter and the humility of our nation’s first president. It has guided us for 250 years, and it will strengthen us for our next 250 years.”
Sounds innocuous, right? But Last called it a “deliberate misreading of history and the sum total is a whitewash of Trump and an insult to everyone struggling to preserve American liberalism.”
“We now understand that the office of the president is not more important than the occupant,” Last argued. “In fact, today we see that the character of the occupant determines the very wisdom of having the office of the presidency as it is constructed. Prior to Trump there had been good presidents and bad presidents … and yet, no president fundamentally threatened the liberal order itself. We now understand that there is a baseline threshold of character below which the powers of the presidency become toxic and the construction of the office becomes a danger to liberalism.”
If anything, Last said Trump exposed a threat lurking in the executive branch that had gone unnoticed because the prior occupants had never been so “wicked, corrupt, malicious, and ambitious in their thirst for power.”
“It turns out that if the occupant of the presidency admires dictators and wishes to be a king, then the presidency affords him a truly dangerous amount of latitude to attempt such a transformation,” said Last.
If the president is “pathologically deranged,” Last said he can use the presidency to create chaos and instability. The 2016 election, he said, showed how the Electoral College “can pervert the will of the people.” The 2020 election revealed “how the transfer of power can be attacked by a determined adversary.”
“And since 2025 we have seen that many of the Constitution’s provisions are unenforceable, that many of the checks and balances can be elided — that a great many of our constitutional protections actually relied on the honor system,” said Last.
Contrary to Bush’s claim that a combination of George Washington’s humble example and the Constitution’s wisdom “will strengthen us for our next 250 years,” Last said Trump showed us all that the “only reason we have a functioning democracy in February 2026 is because, in January 2021 Vice President Mike Pence chose to hold to his duty even as an armed mob came to lynch him at the direction of the sitting president.”
The guardrails for a functional democracy, it turns out, exist only at the whim of individuals.
“And for Bush to blithely insist that everything will work out just fine — that 250 years from now we’ll still have a liberal democracy — is an insult to everyone struggling against emergent fascism in this moment,” said Last. “’It’s him saying, Don’t get all worked up with your TDS. This is all normal.’”
“Tell that to Renee Good and Alex Pretti,” Last fired back. “Tell it to Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn. Tell it to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Andry Hernández Romero, and Liam Ramos. Freedom is not free, you coddled, historically illiterate Pollyanna.”
