All five living former U.S. presidents will be attend a hurricane relief fundraising concert in Texas on Saturday night without President Trump.
Barack Obama, 56, George W. Bush, 71, Bill Clinton, 71, George H.W. Bush, 91 and Jimmy Carter, 93, will all be at the Deep from the Heart: One America Appeal Relief Concert.
The event will take place at Texas A&M university and will feature performances from the rock band Alabama and Lyle Lovett.
It has been organized by the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation whose representatives would not reveal whether the current president had received an invitation to or not.
President Trump is not scheduled to appear at any public events on Saturday. He is spending the weekend at his golf club in Virginia.
Former presidents (R-L) George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter (pictured above together in 2009) will come together on Saturday night for a hurricane relied concert in Texas
As usual, he kicked off his weekend with a string of unrelated tweets which included his announcement that he will make public thousands of classified files about the assassination of JFK.
Saturday night’s concert will raise money for relief efforts in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
It will be the first time the five living former presidents have been together since 2013 when they attended the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas in 2013, when Obama was still in office.
George W. Bush was Texas governor before leaving for the White House and now lives in Dallas.
There is precedent for former presidents joining forces for post-disaster fundraising.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton raised money together after the 2004 South Asia tsunami and Hurricane Katrina the next year. Clinton and George W. Bush combined to seek donations after Haiti’s 2011 earthquake.
‘It’s certainly a triple, if not a home run, every time,’ said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. ‘Presidents have the most powerful and prolific fundraising base of any politician in the world. When they send out a call for help, especially on something that’s not political, they can rake in big money.’
President Trump left the White House on Saturday morning to travel to his golf club in Virginia. Concert organizers have not revealed whether or not he was invited to Saturday night’s event in Texas
Amid criticism that his administration was initially slow to aid storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, Trump accused island leaders of ‘poor leadership,’ and later tweeted that, ‘Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes’ while saying that Federal Emergency Management Agency, first-responders and military personnel wouldn’t be able to stay there forever.
But Rottinghaus said those attending Saturday’s concert were always going to be viewed more favorably since polling consistently shows that “any ex-president is seen as less polarizing than the current president.’
‘They can’t get away from the politics of the moment,’ he said of current White House occupants. ‘Ex-presidents are able to step back and be seen as the nation’s grandfather.’
The Deep from the Heart: One America Appeal concert will begin at 7pm on Saturday night.
All money from ticket sales will be donated to relief funds and further donations can be made at on its website found here.