George Bush on Presidents Day is criticizing authoritarian overreach, which is like the arsonist complaining about fire codes.
As America begins to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I’m pleased to have been asked to write about George Washington’s leadership. As president, I found great comfort and inspiration in reading about my predecessors and the qualities they embodied. […] Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility.
Humility? Hold on a minute, pardner.
The man who launched two unjustified wars on fabricated or inflated pretexts, authorized warrantless mass surveillance, torture, and indefinite detention, and whose administration’s “unitary executive” theory laid the legal groundwork Trump is now exploiting, including the “unlawful combatant” designation now being repurposed for Caribbean special operations. The man who created today’s Frankenstein, is now saying someone should do something about it because… humility?
Yeah, dude. You made this.
- Remember Bush deploying ICE in 2006 for “US secret prisons and twilight raids on immigrant homes“?
- Remember Bush deploying Rove in 2008 to spin political disinformation?
There was a time when conservatives in America demanded a strong foundation in learning from well-known scholars and history precisely to fearlessly navigate new ideas. Strangely, Rove and pals have been able to hijack the group and turn it into drones waiting for instruction (e.g. fascism).
Bush’s absence of humility didn’t just create Trump’s legal architecture for authoritarianism, his administration built the shameless propaganda infrastructure that shoved the conservative base all the way into fascism.
This new Bush essay’s appeal to Washington’s “humility” is itself a Rove-style move: wrapping authoritarian complicity in aspirational language. It reads less like principled dissent and more like legacy management, distancing himself from the monster his own administration incubated, while enabling it to continue.
Invoking stories of Washington is always fraught with historiography. The voluntary relinquishment narrative that Bush tries to sell us is totally mythologized. Washington stepped down in part because he was exhausted, politically battered by partisan press, and understood a third term was politically untenable. It was not some noble philosophical commitment to republican virtue. The Bush hagiography serves the same function it always has: making supreme power appear self-limiting by nature rather than admit the contested struggle that actually forms democracy.
Bush is pumping deep propaganda about the man who owned over 300 enslaved people, pursued runaways relentlessly, rotated them through Philadelphia to exploit a loophole in Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law, and presided over a frontier policy of indigenous displacement. Bush calls out the defining motivational characteristic of Washington, human trafficking operations, and lands on “humility” and “self-restraint“?
You can’t model “putting the good of the nation over self-interest” while literally owning human beings as property.
Look at Georgia in 1733, Vermont in 1777, Carter 1793 who freed all his slaves and called out Washington for selfish refusal.
Georgia’s ban fifty years prior, and then Vermont’s constitution in his face, as well as Pennsylvania openly targeting Washington’s slaves, established that abolition wasn’t some anachronistic standard being imposed retroactively. The legal and moral frameworks existed and Washington was hiding and running. He knew, he wanted to be on the wrong side. He calculated. He moved against the entire world banning slavery, to selfishly force a new country to preserve and expand it instead.
Understand that Carter wasn’t some distant man from Washington. He was a hugely successful Virginia planter who looked at the same institution of human trafficking that Washington dreamed of profits from and said no. Carter shut it down.
It’s literally like someone today looking at Epstein and saying no. Who didn’t say no? That’s Washington.
Every generation of powerful elites produces legal architectures for dehumanizing people for value extraction while maintaining plausible deniability, and then produces apologists who write fraudulent essays about humility after the damage is done.
George should know George better. His history illiteracy continues the tragedy.
Think about the Caribbean war crime operations where Trump is using Bush’s own “unlawful combatant” framework. We have two presidents implicated in connected dehumanizing legal architectures, with one writing hagiography about the other.
In short, as a historian, here’s a scientific measurement of the Bush Presidential message:
