Former President George W. Bush has painted President Donald Trump, according to journalist Jacob Weisberg — and the canvas is not for public consumption. Bush has “painted a really ugly picture of Trump, which he won’t show to anybody,” Weisberg told New York magazine’s Intelligencer in an interview reported on September 15, 2026.
The “Bushisms” series, which cataloged Bush’s verbal stumbles in office, was Weisberg’s creation. He offered the detail to Intelligencer deputy editor Michael Calderone during a conversation about his book “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era,” published September 15 by Penguin Press. Bush is one of the book’s eight subjects, and Weisberg faults the silence of the only living former Republican president, arguing that he has done too little to confront Trump. The Bush chapter ran on its own in The New Yorker on September 1 under the title “George W. Bush’s Code Of Silence,” a piece drawn from “Profiles in Cowardice” that opens with Jeb Bush’s 2016 primary campaign and Trump’s attacks on him. It has been described as mostly critical of Bush while including “a few positive notes.”
Art Therapy in the Post-Presidency
Bush started painting once he left the White House, and Weisberg contends the brush now stands in for the microphone. “He’s expressing all of his feelings through painting, this kind of art therapy,” Weisberg said. His subjects are wounded veterans and immigrants, Weisberg said — a way of engaging with politics without ever stating his views explicitly.
Weisberg likened the hidden Trump portrait to “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The paintings, in his telling, hold Bush’s genuine opinions, which nothing he has said aloud does. Weisberg said other former presidents have occasionally spoken up about Trump’s policies and that Bush could have and should have done the same — but he will not say Trump’s name, taking shelter instead behind the notion that former presidents must remove themselves entirely from commenting. Bush’s Democratic counterparts, ideological differences and all, seem to get a far warmer rapport out of him than Trump does.
Weisberg carried the book to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, September 14, where host Jonathan Lemire made the case for why the silence mattered. “George W. Bush, I feel like might have been the one Republican had he spoken out against Trump at certain junctures in the Trump era, particularly post January 6th, pre-Trump comeback, where his voice would have had enough weight to maybe convince others in the Republican party to say, ‘You know what? Maybe we shouldn’t go back on this Trump thing.’ But yet Bush stayed silent,” Lemire said.
Eight Collaborators, From McConnell to Bezos
Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Chief Justice John Roberts are among the eight public figures Weisberg casts as collaborators, people he says helped return Trump to power and entrench him there. The book opens with a Mark Twain quote and ranges across law firms, universities, courts and Congress, taking in the president of Dartmouth. Weisberg drew a boundary around his title in a September 14 interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” “I’m talking about a particular kind. I’m talking about civic cowardice,” he said. He is not aiming at people over Trump’s politics, he said: “I’m talking about Trump’s dictatorial behavior, his governing by emergency decree and executive order.”
The book begins with Brad Karp, then chairman of the law firm Paul Weiss. After the president targeted the firm in March 2025, Karp signed on to a deal that committed $40 million worth of pro bono representation to causes Trump backs, an arrangement no law firm should have struck, Weisberg says. Karp gave up the chairmanship in February 2026, though he remains a partner. Also profiled: Megyn Kelly, who challenged Trump over his history of misogyny as the 2016 election cycle opened and then in 2024 endorsed him as what she called a protector of women, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2024 killed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and overhauled the paper’s Opinion section. Weisberg says his aim is to understand these choices rather than simply condemn them.
Trump’s History With Unflattering Portraits
This is not the first portrait to irritate Trump. He used Truth Social in March 2025 to blast Colorado Gov. Jared Polis over an image of himself hanging in the state Capitol alongside those of other presidents, complaining that it had been “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” Trump wrote that the same artist, Sarah Boardman, painted former President Obama, “and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst.” Trump’s team donated a replacement that June, a painting based on his official photograph.
A Fresh Trump Jab at Bush World
Trump and the Bush orbit clashed again on Monday, September 14. Karl Rove, a former White House adviser to Bush, is bad for the Republican Party and frequently wrong, Trump wrote on Truth Social. Rove, the president added, suffers from a major case of what he called Trump Derangement Syndrome, a grievance he traced to nearly a decade of beating back the causes Rove championed. He also asked why Fox News and The Wall Street Journal continue to keep his voice alive, and called him “a stone cold loser.”
Weisberg is not asking Bush to become a full-time critic; no one expects ex-presidents to respond to every development, he said. Bush’s quiet, though, belongs to a specific category of failure in his view. Weisberg told Calderone he places Bush among Trump’s enablers not for anything he has done but for everything he hasn’t said — even as Trump dismantled USAID, the agency that helped run PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS program Bush himself launched. “There’s sins of commission and sins of omission,” Weisberg told Calderone, and Bush’s reluctance to criticize Trump publicly falls into the second. As for the painting, Weisberg says Bush still keeps it out of sight.
