Rare Contributor
Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both delivered rebukes to President Donald Trump Thursday without ever mentioning his name.
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The two former presidents, in unrelated events, both delivered addresses that criticized the current state of the nation under Trump.
During an address at the Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World conference in New York, Bush denounced bigotry and nativism shrouded in nationalism, saying that “bigotry seems emboldened.”
“We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism – forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America,” he said. “We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade – forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.”
Bush later added that our identity is not based on geography or ethnicity, but on “soil and blood.”
“This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed,” he continued.
“And it means that the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation.”
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“We know that free governments are the only way to ensure that the strong are just and the weak are valued. And we know that when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed. It is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy,” Bush said, in a seemingly pointed jab at the current leadership in the United States government.
Bush also seemed to take aim at Trump’s habit of using Twitter to lash out at his adversaries, saying during his speech that “bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.”
In an unrelated speech at a campaign rally in Virginia, former President Obama, also made pointed references to the current state of American politics but didn’t explicitly name Trump.
“Folks don’t feel good right now about what they see, they don’t feel as if our public life reflects our best,” he said, “Instead of our politics reflecting our values, we’ve got politics infecting our communities.”
“You’ll notice I haven’t been commenting on politics a lot lately, but here’s one thing I know: If you have to win a campaign by dividing people, you’re not going to be able to govern them. You won’t be able to unite them later if that’s how you start,” Obama told the crowd in Richmond.
Earlier in the day, Obama also campaigned in New Jersey, where he also seemed to poke the Trump administration, saying, “Some of the politics we see now, we thought we put that to bed. That’s folks looking 50 years back, it’s the 21st century, not the 19th century.”
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