The Trump White House extended its low-key running feud with its former occupants to pretty much every living ex-president except Jimmy Carter today, thanks to a New York Times piece in which George H.W. Bush declared Trump a “blowhard,” and his son, George W. Bush, expressed his worries that he’d be the last Republican president.
The former Presidents Bush made their comments back in May 2016, when they were being interviewed for a new book, The Last Republicans (out later this month), about their relationship and careers. “I don’t like him,” the elder Bush said of Trump, who’d just trounced his son Jeb in the Republican primary. “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.” The NYT piece also notes that neither Bush voted for Trump, with W. voting for “none of the above”, and H.W. going for Clinton.
And, because it is impossible for Donald Trump to not respond swiftly and angrily to any form of negative attention directed toward him, ever, the White House issued a statement today attacking the Bushes for their year-old comments, suggesting that they left the Republican Party in a weakened state, and calling the Iraq War “one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history”:
So, for those keeping track, that’s both Bushes, Obama—who’s largely taken the high road and ignored the vast majority of Trump’s digs at him over the previous year—and maybe Clinton (because who can ever tell what that guy’s thinking) all in conflict with the current administration. Fingers crossed that Trump doesn’t go after peanut farms or Habitat For Humanity, or he might end up with all The X-Presidents on his ass.