Washington
\nFormer US president George HW Bush voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and called Donald Trump a \u201cblowhard\u201d who was driven by \u201ca certain ego.\u201d His son George W. Bush left his ballot blank and said about Trump: \u201cThis guy doesn\u2019t know what it means to be president.\u201d<\/p>\n
The revelations, contained in historian Mark Updegrove\u2019s \u201cThe Last Republicans,\u201d available in bookstores later this month, represent the strongest criticism to date from the Bush clan on why their Republican successor is uniquely unfit to hold office.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t like him,\u201d the elder Bush told Updegrove in May 2016 before the elections in November of that year, according to excerpts of the book obtained by AFP.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know much about him, but I know he\u2019s a blowhard.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m not too excited about him being (our) leader.\u201d<\/p>\n
The younger Bush, meanwhile, was skeptical about then- candidate Trump\u2019s chances in a race in which his younger brother Jeb was an early favorite.<\/p>\n
\u201cInteresting, won\u2019t last,\u201d was his initial reaction when Trump entered the race.<\/p>\n
Once the bombastic billionaire real estate magnate secured the Republican nomination, Bush expressed surprise and worried about Trump\u2019s lack of humility, and thus his inability to recognize his own limitations and surround himself with more knowledgeable people.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs you know from looking at my family,\u201d Bush said, humility \u201cis a certain heritage, that\u2019s what they expect, and we\u2019re not seeing that\u201d in Trump.<\/p>\n
After Trump said, \u201cI\u2019m my own advisor,\u201d Bush quipped: \u201cWow, this guy really doesn\u2019t understand the job of president.\u201d<\/p>\n
The comments are sure to escalate a long-running feud and come after George W. Bush gave a speech last month that condemned bigotry, bullying and lies in US politics in what was widely seen as a broadside against Trump even though the president was not mentioned by name.<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s title was inspired by the younger Bush\u2019s concerns that he had been \u201cthe last Republican president\u201d\u2014not just because Clinton was seen as favorite to win the election, but because Trump represented a major break from traditional conservatism.<\/p>\n
A White House official hit back, telling CNN: \u201cIf one presidential candidate can disassemble a political party, it speaks volumes about how strong a legacy its past two presidents really had.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that begins with the Iraq war, one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history,\u201d the official added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington Former US president George HW Bush voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and called Donald Trump a \u201cblowhard\u201d who was driven by \u201ca certain ego.\u201d His son George W. Bush left his ballot blank and said about Trump: \u201cThis guy doesn\u2019t know what it means to be president.\u201d The revelations, contained in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9437,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9435\/revisions\/9437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}