It’s not often that you see former presidents weigh in on the affairs of the current one — in fact, that kind of behavior is largely limited to Trump. Generally, a leader doesn’t comment on things like that until after someone’s left office, largely because they can imagine themselves being in a situation where their authority is being undercut by a more popular president.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, literally every president is more popular than him, so every living ex-president would have to stay silent all the time in order to keep from sounding like they were undermining him.
Personally, I can’t imagine having the patience to stay quiet about Trump as he bungles and bumbles his way through this first and hopefully only term. Especially right now, as we watch him literally hold the entire country hostage to one of his campaign promises that he’s already broken anyway, since it isn’t being paid for the way he said it would be. He told his supporters he was going to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico, and that he would make our neighbors to the south pay for the privilege of putting up the bricks themselves.
Obviously, that hasn’t happened — and no one serious believes it ever will. Trump thinks it will, however, and he thinks he’s going to bully his way into getting Democrats in Congress to offer him money for the wall.
One former president who’s sick of hearing about the Trump Shutdown, however, is the last Republican who ran the country — George W. Bush. And since every living ex-president gets Secret Service protection until they’re dead and gone, it’s not hard to see how Dubya might empathize with the agents covering him who currently aren’t getting paid. In fact, he took them some pizza himself and used the opportunity to post a picture of it to Instagram and implore “both sides” to put this shutdown behind us as a country.
Laura and I are grateful to our Secret Service personnel and the thousands of Federal employees who are working hard for our country without a paycheck. And we thank our fellow citizens who are supporting them. It’s time for leaders on both sides to put politics aside, come together, and end this shutdown.”
And while Dubya is using the “both sides” talk of the current political era, his record speaks for itself when it comes to immigration — he supported increased enforcement, but would never have made these demands for a wall, and in fact, wanted Congress to provide undocumented aliens with a path to citizenship
Let’s see what Donnie has to say about his predecessor.
Featured image via screen capture
