NEW YORK: Former president George W. Bush issued a sharp if veiled denunciation of Trumpism on Thursday, warning that bigotry, white supremacy and falsehoods are coarsening the national tone and threatening American democracy.

“Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” Bush said in a speech in New York. He did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but Bush offered unmistakable criticism of the current administration and the controversial politics of millions of voters who swept Trump to victory last November. “Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed,” Bush said.

Argument “turns too easily into animosity,” he added. “Disagreement escalates into dehumanization.” Unlike his Democratic successor Barack Obama, the Republican Bush has said very little publicly about Trump or the state of US politics.

Thursday’s speech — at the Bush Institute’s Spirit of Liberty event — marked a departure from that silence, an expression of concern by a former leader in a unique moment in the nation’s history.

“We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism and forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America,” the 71-year-old Bush said. “We’ve seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together.” The 43rd president, observing America’s “fading confidence” in free markets and international trade, lamented the “return of isolationist sentiments” in the country.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2017