Politico: “Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly declared that ‘the last thing we need is another Bush,’ as he vowed to take on two political dynasties — the Bushes and the Clintons. But as president, Trump has been increasingly dipping into the talent pool from the George W. Bush administration that he regularly vilified during the campaign to now fill critical administration posts.”

“Trump promised to drain the swamp and instead rely on Washington outsiders, but nearly 100 days into his term, the staffing and political realities have set in, and his team has been turning to some of the top old hands of the Bush administration. Just this past week, the White House sent out a press release announcing the nomination of four confirmation-level hires, with three out of the four being former Bush administration staffers.”

Jonathan Chait: “The Bush presidency was the most comprehensive governing failure of any administration since at least Herbert Hoover, and it ought to have poisoned the party’s national brand as deeply as it did Hoover’s GOP (which did not win another presidential election for twenty years). But the Republican Party managed to largely skirt the reputational fallout from the Bush catastrophe. It did so, in part, through the tea party: Conservatives hailed right-wing protests against Barack Obama as a call for ideological purity, cleansing the supposed big-government, cronyist tendencies of the Bush administration. The Republican Party of the Obama era insisted it had learned the lessons of the Bush years, when its agenda had devolved into little more than shoveling cash to K Street. The post-Bush GOP was allegedly sadder and wiser and filled with righteous abhorrence for the temptations of lobbyists and deficit spending.”

“Those lessons have all been forgotten. The Republican government, under Trump, has retraced the steps it took under Bush — from the obsession with tax cuts for the rich, to the vanishing line between the party’s paid lobbyists and its public servants. The reality is that, contrary to the willful misreading of conservatives elites, the tea-party revolution was not fundamentally a reaction against deficits or crony capitalism: It was a heavily racialized backlash against social change. And that spirit — the true animating spirit of the grassroots right — has lived on in Trump’s presidency.”

Washington Post: “Few official acts reveal more about an individual president than the Presidential Medal of Freedom designations. While the general categories have remained fairly constant since President John F. Kennedy established the modern version of the honor in 1963 — public servants, creative artists and athletes are traditionally well represented — the specific choices often pose a study in contrasts.”

“The demographic differences between Presidents Obama and George W. Bush’s honorees, for example, are quite telling. African Americans represented roughly the same portion of each man’s designations—18 percent of Obama’s, compared to 17 percent for Bush —but women have made up 36 percent of the medal’s recipients under the current president versus 15 percent during Bush’s time in office. In a similar vein, Obama has awarded the honor to a higher proportion of Hispanics, Asian Americans, Native Americans and gay and lesbian Americans than W did.”