Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested Friday that because Presidents George W. Bush and President Barack Obama didn’t say President Trump’s name, they weren’t criticizing him during speeches yesterday.
‘I’m not sure of the last time they spoke, but our understanding is that those comments were not directed towards the president,’ Huckabee Sanders told a reporter who had asked about Trump’s relationship with Bush.
She expanded her answer to encompass Obama as well.
‘And, in fact, when these two individuals, both past presidents, have criticized the president they have done so by name and very rarely do it without being pretty direct,’ she pointed out. ‘As both of them tend to be.’
‘So we’ll take them at their word that their actions and comments weren’t directed at the president,’ Huckabee Sanders said.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama weren’t criticizing President Trump in speeches they gave yesterday, because they didn’t utter his name
On Thursday, Bush and Obama were, coincidentally, both back on the political stage, with President Bush speaking to a foundation audience in New York and his Democratic successor speaking at two rallies for Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia.
Both men, from opposite political persuasions, talked about today’s toxic political climate while preaching tolerance and togetherness as a way to climb out of the hole.
At his George W. Bush Institute event, the former Republican leader talked of the threats to democracy abroad and here at home.
He spoke of political discourse being ‘degraded by casual cruelty.’
And pointed to the ‘American dream of upward mobility’ being out of reach for many of those left behind by the modern economy, suggesting that was a root cause for the deepened discontent and sharpened political divide.
‘Bigotry seems emboldened,’ Bush said. ‘Our politics seem more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.’
When asked about those particular lines at the White House today, Huckabee Sander deflected the blame off of Trump, hitting the media instead.
‘I think if anybody is pushing a lot of fabricated things right now I think that would be coming from the news media and we would certainly agree with that sentiment,’ Trump’s spokeswoman said.
When a reporter tried following up about the ‘bigotry’ charge Huckabee Sanders didn’t answer, having already moved on.
During his two appearances Thursday, for New Jersey governor candidate Philip D. Murphy and Virginia governor candidate Ralph Northam, Obama talked about old-style politics being dredged back from the dead.
‘What we can’t have is the same old politics of division that we have seen so many times before that dates back centuries,’ Obama said at the event for Murphy. ‘Some of the politics we see now, we thought we put that to bed.’
‘That has folks looking 50 years back,’ he added. ‘It’s the 21st century, not the 19th century, come on!’
Trump has consistently harped on bringing back a better America from the past – hence his campaign motto, ‘Make America Great Again!’ – while touting policy prescriptions like building a wall to keep illegal immigrants out, banning Muslims from entering the United States and telling transgender troops they can no longer serve.
The most political trouble Trump got himself in came in August when he suggested that ‘both sides’ were responsible for racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a group of white supremacists took over the town and counter-protesters showed up to reject their message.
Both Bush and Obama entered the fray in the aftermath of Charlottesville too, issuing statements against racism and hate.
Bush, in another nod to what Trump could have handled better, brought up these issues in New York as well.
‘Our identity as a nation – unlike many other nations – is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood,’ he said.
The phrase ‘blood and soil’ had been the white supremacists chant in Charlottesville.
‘This means that people of every race, religion and ethnicity can be fully and equally America,’ Bush said. ‘It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed,’ the former commander-in-chief said to great applause.
‘And it means that the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation,’ he said.