George W. Bush's speech is widely being interpreted as an attack on Trump or Trumpism, and maybe it was, but there's an alternative possible reading of it. I'm thinking of the sentence in which Mr. Bush says, "our democracy needs a media that is transparent, accurate and fair." That seemed to me like an endorsement of Trump's press criticism. As for the parts of the speech supporting "free markets" and denouncing "bigotry," they can be read as attacks on Trump but they also can be read as Bush critiquing himself for Sarbanes-Oxley, for the actions to seize Fannie Mae and AIG precipitating the financial crisis, or for the Republican Party's participation in a series of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives that coincided with Mr. Bush's presidential re-election in 2004, the same year Mr. Bush called for a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.
The generally fawning press reception to his speech seemed related more to the idea of his attacking Trump. It didn't really get into the question of whether Bush was a hypocrite, or whether in fact he was being self-critical. Mr. Bush's speech articulates eloquent principles, but if he's going to be perceived as faulting Trump for failing to uphold them, it seems only fair to at least peek at how the George W. Bush administration met or fell short of those same standards.
