“That makes him look very guilty.”

— President Trump, quoted by The Hill, on former President Biden pardoning his family in the final 20 minutes of his term.

“President Joe Biden said a key regret of his four years in office was not taking more credit — and reminding voters — of his administration’s accomplishments, including infrastructure and Covid relief spending,” CNN reports.

Said Biden: “The mistake we made was — I think I made — was not getting our allies to acknowledge that the Democrats did this. So, for example, building a new billion-dollar bridge over the river, we’ll call it the ‘Democratic Bridge,’ figuratively speaking.”

He added: “Talk about who put it together. Let people know that this was something the Democrats did, that it was done by the party. That’s different than me writing a check and me signing a check and saying I did it.”

A new AP-NORC poll finds that “as Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Americans have a dimmer view of his presidency than they did at the end of Donald Trump’s first term or Barack Obama’s second.”

“Around one-quarter of U.S. adults said Biden was a ‘good’ or ‘great’ president, with less than 1 in 10 saying he was ‘great.'”

“It’s a stark illustration of how tarnished Biden’s legacy has become, with many members of his own party seeing his Democratic presidency as merely mediocre.”

“Expect the White House to tout a new milestone on Monday: $1 trillion of private sector money put toward clean technology and manufacturing — investments officials say are a result of Biden-era legislation,” Axios reports.

Matthew Yglesias: “The wheels fell off Bushism relatively rapidly after its triumphant reelection, but the period between Bush’s inauguration and the 2006 midterms is a striking and important one.”

“It’s the only time since Reagan that the conservative movement was truly governing the country. It also falls into a weird kind of gap where the Bush presidency is too recent to be history but too distant to be vividly remembered by many. And I think it’s worth taking a look back and trying to genuinely assess his administration’s major initiatives.”

Jordan Heller has an oral history of when shoes were thrown at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Iraq.

Two former CIA officials told Insider that the George W. Bush administration misrepresented intelligence to assert a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

In fact, the evidence assembled by the CIA suggested that no such connection existed.

NBC News: “This is also the story, unknown to many Americans, of how Bush — a devoutly religious man who campaigned for president on a platform of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ but whose legacy was stained by the carnage of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan quagmire — conceived of and launched a juggernaut aid program that is widely credited with saving sub-Saharan Africa from cataclysm.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney never apologized to Harry Whittington — who died yesterday — for shooting him in the face while hunting, the Washington Post reports.

Texas Monthly: “A status akin to royalty had coalesced in Texas, and the family set up shop—twice—in the White House. Then, as a harsher style of politics gained favor, it all fell apart. Today, a future Bush dynasty looks even more unlikely than it did fifty years ago.”

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who later became a Washington Post columnist and vocal critic of Donald Trump, died of cancer at age 58, the Washington Post reports.

Gerson was a truly beautiful writer. His essay on dropping off his son at college is particularly memorable, especially this line: “He has a wonderful future in which my part naturally diminishes. I have no possible future that is better without him close.”

“Ari Fleischer has drawn suspicion for announcing the end of his near-annual recounting of the 9/11 attacks after being hired by the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour,” the HuffPost reports.

Former President George W. Bush didn’t have the best things to say about his successor as Texas governor, Rick Perry, when he spoke to Mitt Romney during the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, Insider reports.

Said Bush: “People thought I was dumb. Well, wait till you get a load of this guy.”

“An alleged ISIS-linked operative in the U.S. was plotting to kill George W. Bush, going so far as to travel to Dallas in November to take video around the former president’s home and recruiting help from a team of compatriots he hoped to smuggle into the country over the Mexican border,” Forbes reports.