President Trump welcomed his onetime political nemesis’s son to join him onstage Wednesday, praising the Texas land commissioner for being “the only Bush who likes me.”
George P. Bush, son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush, nephew of former president George W. Bush, and grandchild of the late Barbara Bush and former president George H.W. Bush, is the only Bush in public office right now, which means embracing the man who controls the Republican Party, even as he took a dig at the rest of the Bush family in real time.
“Truly, this is the only Bush who got it right,” Trump said at an event in Crosby, Tex., as the younger Bush shook the president’s hand. “He’s going far. He’s going places.”
After Jeb Bush’s bruising defeat to Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary — a campaign that saw him reduced to a caricature of Trump’s design, “Low Energy Jeb” — it was not a secret how the Bush family felt about the current president.
But George P. Bush, who has lofty political ambitions of his own, won his statewide election in 2018 by campaigning on his support for Trump, and Trump endorsed him in the competitive GOP primary for land commissioner.
Later that year, he saw what happens if his family’s criticism of Trump is too pronounced.
In June 2018, Donald Trump Jr. canceled a fundraiser for him after Jeb Bush publicly criticized the Trump administration policy that led to the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border. Trump Jr. warned George P. Bush that there’d be a political price if Jeb Bush didn’t stop criticizing the president, The Washington Post reported then.
More recently, a new biography of Barbara Bush revealed details of the former first lady’s vehement disdain for Trump.
Asked about it, Trump said he couldn’t blame her.
“Look what I did to her sons,” he said.
Otherwise known as George P. Bush’s father and uncle.
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