Former President George W. Bush has a portrait of President Donald Trump that nobody is allowed to look at, according to journalist Jacob Weisberg. Bush has “painted a really ugly picture of Trump, which he won’t show to anybody,” Weisberg told New York magazine’s Intelligencer in remarks reported on September 15, 2026.
Weisberg created the “Bushisms” series, the catalog of Bush’s verbal stumbles in office. He made the remark to Michael Calderone, deputy editor of Intelligencer, during a discussion of his book “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era,” published September 15 by Penguin Press. Weisberg faults Bush’s silence — the only living former Republican president has done too little to confront Trump, he argues — and profiles him as one of the book’s eight subjects.
Weisberg also drew on the book for a long article about Bush in The New Yorker, titled “George W. Bush’s Code Of Silence,” published September 1.
Art Therapy After the White House
Bush took up painting once he left the White House, and Weisberg contends the brush now does the work the microphone used to. “He’s expressing all of his feelings through painting, this kind of art therapy,” Weisberg said. Bush paints wounded veterans and immigrants, Weisberg said, an attempt to engage with politics without ever stating his views explicitly.
Weisberg likened the hidden Trump portrait to “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” arguing that Bush’s real views live in the artwork instead of in anything he has said aloud. Other former presidents have occasionally spoken up about Trump’s policies, Weisberg said, and Bush could have and should have done the same — but he will not say Trump’s name. Instead, Weisberg said, Bush hides behind the notion that former presidents must remove themselves entirely from commenting. Bush and his Democratic counterparts differ ideologically, yet he appears far warmer with them than with Trump.
Eight Collaborators, From McConnell to Bezos
Weisberg casts eight public figures as collaborators — people who, in his telling, helped put Trump back in power and keep him there. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Chief Justice John Roberts are among them, and so is the president of Dartmouth. In a September 14 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep described Weisberg’s eight subjects as “leaders of law firms, universities, courts and Congress.” Weisberg told Inskeep: “I’m talking about civic cowardice.” He said he is not targeting people who “oppose Trump’s politics” but rather “Trump’s dictatorial behavior, his governing by emergency decree and executive order.”
Conviction at Trump’s second impeachment trial, held after the January 6 attack, required a two-thirds majority — 67 of 100 senators — and would have opened the way to a separate majority vote barring him from future office. The tally fell short, 57 to 43. McConnell declined to reconvene the Senate before Joe Biden was sworn in, then voted to acquit while calling Trump “practically and morally responsible” for provoking the day’s events and pointing to the criminal justice system as the proper venue. Roughly 40 months later, Roberts wrote the majority opinion that granted former presidents absolute immunity for their core constitutional powers, plus at least presumptive immunity for other official acts. Weisberg sharply criticizes that ruling, which unwound multiple prosecutions.
The book opens with a Mark Twain quotation, which Weisberg read aloud to NPR on September 14: “It is curious, curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” Weisberg’s first subject is Brad Karp, then chairman of the law firm Paul Weiss. Karp agreed in March 2025, after the president targeted the firm, to a deal that included $40 million worth of pro bono representation for causes Trump backs. No law firm should have struck that bargain, Weisberg says. Karp resigned the chairmanship in February 2026 and remains a partner. Megyn Kelly is another subject: at the start of the 2016 election cycle she challenged Trump over his history of misogyny, and in 2024 she endorsed him as what she called a protector of women. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is in the book as well, for killing the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 and overhauling the paper’s Opinion section. His aim, Weisberg says, is to understand these choices rather than simply condemn them.
Trump’s History With Unflattering Portraits
Portraits that displease Trump have set him off before. He used Truth Social in March 2025 to blast Colorado Gov. Jared Polis over a portrait of himself hanging in the state Capitol alongside those of other presidents, complaining that the image had been “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” The same artist, Sarah Boardman, painted former President Obama, Trump wrote, “and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst.” He said he would rather have no picture at all, and that Polis “should be ashamed of himself.” That June, Trump’s team donated a replacement, a painting based on his official photograph.
Weisberg appeared on Morning Joe on Monday, September 14. Host Jonathan Lemire said of 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.”
A Fresh Trump Jab at Bush World
The friction between Trump and the Bush orbit flared again on Monday, September 14, in a Truth Social post in which Trump wrote that Karl Rove, a former White House adviser to Bush, is bad for the Republican Party and frequently wrong. Rove suffers from a major case of what Trump called Trump Derangement Syndrome, the president wrote, dating the grievance to nearly a decade of beating back the causes Rove championed. He also asked why Fox News and The Wall Street Journal keep Rove’s voice alive, calling him “a stone cold loser.” Rove had said he would vote Democratic in order to cast a ballot against Bo French, a Republican candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission whom Rove described as a bigot. Jon Rosenthal, a Democrat, is French’s opponent.
Nobody expects ex-presidents to respond to every development, Weisberg said, and he is not asking Bush to become a full-time critic. But he places Bush’s quiet in a specific category of failure. “There’s sins of commission and sins of omission,” Weisberg told Calderone, assigning Bush’s reluctance to criticize Trump publicly to the second. In the same Intelligencer interview, Weisberg said Bush stayed silent even as Trump “dismantled USAID,” the agency that helped run PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS program Bush launched. The painting, Weisberg says, remains where Bush has kept it: out of sight.
