The Bush Era Is Over

‘T hat was some weird sh**.” So spoke former president George W. Bush after what we can now call the first inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017. This past Wednesday, Bush was singing a different tune. “I congratulate President Trump on his election as the 47th President of the United States of America,” he said. It was a simple statement that conveyed much more than mere congratulations. It signaled the end of the Bush era in politics, a fact with which both Right and Left must reckon.

It may seem ridiculous to say that we were still in the Bush era at all. His presidency ended in 2009, amid financial chaos for the country and political catastrophe for Republicans. But presidencies can have long shadows and afterlives. Electoral eras are not always discrete and disjunct. Figures who secured power and influence in one period linger into the next, as do their accomplishments — and their failures.

For Republicans, this reality was most obvious in the person of Jeb Bush, brother of George. Jeb, an excellent governor of Florida, ended up a convenient foil for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when familial obligation forced upon him the unenviable task of defending many of the aspects of his brother’s presidency on which Republican voters had soured. Jeb’s last stand in South Carolina, with his mother and brother by his side, was the Bush brand’s previous nadir.

But it was not just Jeb. For many years, even as Republicans experienced success at the congressional, state, and local levels during Barack Obama’s presidency, W’s 2004 win loomed large in the Republican imagination as the party’s sole post–Cold War, popular-vote presidential victory. Trump’s 2016 win involved an Electoral College disparity that complicated internecine arguments over the best way forward for the party; his 2020 loss made them more heated still.

The 2024 election has now ended 2004’s uniqueness. Donald Trump appears set to win the popular vote, and to do so having seemingly surpassed Bush’s percentage of the Latino vote, despite the former’s considerable shift toward a hard-line view on immigration. Trump also won despite visible public protestations from many in Bush’s orbit — notably excluding Bush himself — such as his vice president, Dick Cheney, and many who worked in his administration.

They did not merely decline to support Trump, but actively abandoned their principles and supported Kamala Harris. In so doing, they discredited themselves, retroactively undermined the era of their political dominance, and helped to induce a firm separation in the Republican Party between the era of Bush and the era of Trump.

In its way, the Democratic Party has signaled the end of the Bush era as well. When Bush was president, the party naturally defined itself in opposition to him. Yet to secure governing majorities, Democrats sought out political talent that at least seemed moderate.

This strategy began to bear fruit in the 2006 midterms. Historically bad for Republicans in the wake of an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, criticism of Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, and widespread corruption on the part of their officeholders and their hangers-on, these elections yielded a host of center-left Democrats in places they would not otherwise have been. One of them was Tim Walz, who could at one time plausibly represent a rural Minnesota congressional district. This was many years before the transformation of the Democratic Party dragged him further and further to the left. Though Walz became governor of Minnesota in 2018 and was reelected in 2022, he lost the counties in his former district in the latter year, just as the presidential ticket he served on this year did.

Even more representative than Walz of the end of the Bush era for Democrats is the 2006 Senate trio of Bob Casey Jr., Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown. Casey, the son of a Pennsylvania governor, defeated the pro-life Republican Rick Santorum in part by having sufficient pro-life credentials of his own. His father defended Pennsylvania’s protections for the unborn all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1992. And for many years, Casey Jr. made at least a pretense to the pro-life position. But this year, following his party’s lurch toward abortion extremism, saw a shift from Planned Parenthood v. Casey to Planned Parenthood with Casey. And he is now set to be replaced in the Senate by Republican Dave McCormick.

Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown join Casey in defeat. Tester, an authentic Montanan who still works a farm on multigenerational family land, had leaned hard into his identity, his state’s unique form of “leave-me-alone” populism, and his occasional high-profile deviations from the party line to stave off opponents in 2012 and 2018. But as Montana grew redder, he did not follow it. He thus became vulnerable to Tim Sheehy, a Republican who defied Tester’s playbook of attacking an opponent as an out-of-stater.

Sherrod Brown, who defeated current Ohio governor Mike DeWine for Senate, had prevailed by leaning into economic populism and getting lucky in his opponents. He, Casey, and Tester all benefited from being up for reelection in 2012 and 2018, both good years for Democrats. But Ohio, once the quintessential swing state (it was the tipping-point state of Bush’s 2004 win), has turned ruby red since 2016. But Brown stayed blue, and lost to Bernie Moreno.

The fact that, Right and Left, political figures and trends that emerged in the Bush era lasted as long as they did attests to the difficulty of drawing neat lines about when one period starts and when one ends. American politics is not leaving that era behind completely. It still provides lessons for both Right and Left, if they choose to heed them. The Bush presidency, flawed as it was, had some utility for conservatives: tax cuts, pro-life measures, at least one reliably originalist Supreme Court justice. Even its failures are usefully instructive. (Another presidency remains a better benchmark, however.) And it will be interesting to see if Democrats have sufficient circumspection to admit that some measure of moderation might behoove them should they desire working majorities again.

But anyone who looks at the Bush era now will have to do so as a student of history. The 2024 election has broken the direct continuity it may have still had with our own time. This fact ought to bring some humility to anyone who thinks that any extant political configuration can endure eternally. The next few years will undoubtedly bring “some weird sh**,” as Bush might put it. And from it, we will get a better sense of how long the Trump era will last.