A portrait of President Donald Trump exists somewhere in former President George W. Bush’s studio, and journalist Jacob Weisberg says no one is allowed near it. Bush has “painted a really ugly picture of Trump, which he won’t show to anybody,” Weisberg said in an interview with New York magazine’s Intelligencer, reported on September 15, 2026.
The remark came in a conversation with Michael Calderone, deputy editor of Intelligencer, about his book “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era,” which Penguin Press published September 15. Weisberg built the “Bushisms” series around Bush’s verbal stumbles in office. He now faults the only living former Republican president for his silence, arguing that Bush has done too little to confront Trump — and profiling him as one of the book’s eight subjects. The New Yorker ran the Bush chapter as an excerpt on September 1, under the title “George W. Bush’s Code of Silence.”
Art Therapy in the Post-Presidency
Bush took up painting once he left the White House, and in Weisberg’s telling the brush now does the job a microphone would. “He’s expressing all of his feelings through painting, this kind of art therapy,” Weisberg said. Bush paints wounded veterans and immigrants, he said — a way of engaging with politics without stating his views.
Weisberg likened the hidden portrait to “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The canvases, in his reading, hold what Bush actually thinks, since nothing he has said out loud does. Other former presidents have commented on Trump’s policies from time to time, he noted, and Bush had the same opening and the same obligation — but he will not say Trump’s name, hiding instead behind the notion that former presidents must remove themselves entirely from commenting.
Eight Collaborators, From McConnell to Bezos
Weisberg casts the eight public figures he profiles as collaborators who helped return Trump to power and entrench him there. Among them are former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Chief Justice John Roberts and Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth, with the cast drawn from law firms, universities, courts and Congress.
Conviction at Trump’s second impeachment trial needed 67 of 100 senators; the count was 57 to 43. McConnell voted to acquit, having called Trump “practically and morally responsible” for January 6 and pointed to the courts as the proper venue. Roberts wrote the 2024 opinion granting former presidents broad immunity for official acts, which unwound several prosecutions and which Weisberg criticizes sharply.
The law firm Paul Weiss and its then chairman, Brad Karp, open the book. The president targeted the firm, and in March 2025 Karp signed a deal whose terms included $40 million worth of pro bono representation for causes Trump backs. Karp, the only one of the eight who agreed to be interviewed, had held out for five days. He “made a disastrous decision in agreeing to make a deal with the White House after only five days,” Weisberg said. Karp resigned the chairmanship in February 2026 and remains a partner.
Also profiled are Megyn Kelly, who endorsed Trump in 2024 after challenging him over his history of misogyny in 2016, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who killed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris that year and overhauled the paper’s Opinion section. His aim, Weisberg says, is to understand these choices rather than condemn them.
In an interview aired September 14, Weisberg drew a line around the word in his title, telling NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that the failing he describes is a specific kind. “I’m talking about civic cowardice,” he said. His targets are not people who “oppose Trump’s politics,” he said, but people who failed to push back on what he called “Trump’s dictatorial behavior, his governing by emergency decree and executive order.”
He made the same case that morning on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” where host Jonathan Lemire said Bush’s voice “would have had enough weight to maybe convince others in the Republican party” after January 6. “But yet Bush stayed silent,” Lemire said, relaying an account that Bush does not want to get booed the next time he walks into a Dallas steakhouse. Weisberg pointed to the Cheneys, who voted for Kamala Harris despite disagreeing with her about everything because they judged the election a question about democracy. “I think it could have made a difference in 2016 and again in 2024,” he said.
Portraits he dislikes have set Trump off before. He complained on Truth Social in March 2025 that a portrait of himself in the Colorado state Capitol had been “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” It came down, and a White House-donated replacement went up that July.
A Fresh Jab at Bush World
Trump took another swipe at the Bush orbit on Monday, September 14. Karl Rove, Bush’s former White House adviser, had said he would cross party lines in the Texas Railroad Commission race and vote for Democrat Jon Rosenthal over Republican Bo French, citing French’s posts about South Asian students at the University of Texas at Austin. “Karl Rove is so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often,” Trump wrote in reply, adding that Rove “suffers from a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome” and asking why Fox News and The Wall Street Journal keep his voice alive. “The guy is a stone cold loser!”
Sins of Omission
Weisberg does not want Bush to be a full-time critic, and he said nobody expects ex-presidents to respond to every development. Bush’s quiet, though, belongs to a specific category of failure in his telling. “There’s sins of commission and sins of omission,” Weisberg told Calderone, putting Bush’s reluctance to criticize Trump publicly in the second column. He tied that silence to Trump having “dismantled USAID,” the agency that helped run PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS program Bush launched.
Not everyone is persuaded. Russ Smith of Splice Today, writing on September 16, called the case against the 43rd president unconvincing.
Bush has not responded to the book, and his office has not commented on the portrait. As for the canvas, Weisberg says Bush keeps it exactly where he has always kept it: out of sight.