Former president George W Bush revealed in an interview with People magazine that he didn’t vote for either the Republican incumbent Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election. Instead, he wrote in Condoleezza Rice.
Rice, who served as secretary of state for Bush from 2005 to 2009, was aware of the write-in. But, “She told me she would refuse to accept the office,” Bush shared.
This revelation comes amid a promotional book tour for Bush’s new compilation of oil paintings depicting American immigrants and their stories.
It’s all in an effort, Bush says, to soften hearts for compassionate immigration reforms after several years of harsh and “frightening” anti-immigrant rhetoric, mostly from his own Republican party.
Earlier this week, Bush criticized the GOP, calling current actors in the party “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist”. Bush told People that he “painted with too broad a brush” and excluded “a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem”.
But the former president is not without his own history of faults, and his journey to rehabilitation after a devastating presidency built upon the “war on terror” isn’t as well received by many as one would think.
Bush’s legacy includes the illegal invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He resisted LGBTQ+ rights, botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
