July 27, 2021

Trump Stiffs George P. Bush, “the Only Bush That Likes Me”

The ex-president endorsed Bush’s scandal-plagued rival in the GOP primary for Texas attorney general.

George P. Bush

Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Wire

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Former President Donald Trump picked a side in one of the most significant Republican primaries of the 2022 election cycle on Monday night, endorsing Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in his bid for a third term. This may sound perfectly normal, but it’s not; nothing involving either Trump or Paxton ever is.

Paxton, as you may have heard, has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud but has somehow managed to avoid going to trial, with help from influential friends in his home county. More recently, members of his own staff reported him to the Department of Justice for alleged corruption, accusing him of abusing the powers of his office by interfering in a federal investigation into an Austin real-estate developer who was employing a woman with whom Paxton was allegedly having an affair. On top of all of this, the State Bar of Texas is investigating his conduct last December, when he led a (Trump-backed) effort to overturn the results of the presidential election on the bizarre legal grounds that Pennsylvania’s election results were an affront to Texas.

So yes, of course, Trump endorsed Paxton. But in endorsing the attorney general—and a full year before the primary, at that—Trump also very publicly rejected Paxton’s top rival for the job, state land commissioner George P. Bush. Trump has seemingly spent the last six years on a quest to humiliate, one by one, every member of the extended Bush family, but this might actually be the harshest version of that routine yet, because of the lengths that George P. went to prevent it from happening.

Unlike his father, Jeb; his uncle, George W.; his grandfather, George H.W.; his grandmother, Barbara; or even his cousin, Pierce, George P. Bush has been unwavering in his support for Trump. He campaigned alongside Trump during the 2020 election, and from the very beginning of his campaign against Paxton sought to link his own political brand to that of the ex-president, even if it means disavowing the rest of his family.

At his campaign announcement, Bush supporters handed out beer koozies featuring Trump shaking Bush’s hand while saying—and this is a real quote—”This is the only Bush that likes me! This is the Bush that got it right.”

Bush wanted every Republican in Texas to know he was close to the former president. He sought his counsel on the race. It was literally his pinned tweet.

Such a message carries a political cost. Bush’s campaign against Paxton is supposed to be about replacing a corrupt incumbent with a more honest and stable brand—a rotten Republican with a normal one. He still might be in decent shape in the race. Bush raised more money than Paxton in the most recent filing period, and there were signs that Paxton donors were beginning to jump ship. (Though it wouldn’t be the first time.) But Bush’s public lobbying for Trump’s affection is a revealing misadventure—good-government reformers don’t support the guy who tried to do a coup while his organization was being investigated for financial crimes.

There are few things Trump loves more than watching political rivals display fealty, so it was fitting, perhaps even inevitable, that after all of Bush’s groveling, Trump simply pulled the rug out from under him. Bush’s slip-up on the banana peel calls to mind a famous saying of his uncle:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.'”

But you can, apparently. The gulf between the Bush family and the Trumps is sort of superficial in the context of their respective politics, but meaningful in interpersonal ways. Because Trump did not just attack George P. Bush’s father, Jeb—fair play to him, perhaps. He went after George P.’s mother as well, going out of his way to remind Republican primary voters that Columba Bush was a Mexican immigrant, at a time when Trump’s campaign largely consisted of disparaging people of Mexican descent.

Is there a larger lesson here in Republican politics? We’ll see. But there’s probably a life lesson at least: Don’t try to be friends with people who go after your mother.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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