Journalist Jacob Weisberg says there is a portrait of President Donald Trump that former President George W. Bush keeps hidden from everyone. 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.
Michael Calderone, deputy editor of Intelligencer, drew the remark out during a conversation about Weisberg’s book “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era,” published September 15 by Penguin Press. Weisberg created the “Bushisms” series, a catalog of Bush’s verbal stumbles in office. The New Yorker ran a long Weisberg article on Bush drawn from the book, “George W. Bush’s Code Of Silence,” on September 1. Bush is the only living former Republican president, and one of the book’s eight subjects; Weisberg argues he has done too little to confront Trump.
Art Therapy in the Post-Presidency
Bush took up painting after he left the White House. Weisberg reads the canvases as a substitute for a microphone. “He’s expressing all of his feelings through painting, this kind of art therapy,” he said. Bush paints wounded veterans and immigrants, a way of touching politics without ever stating his views.
Weisberg likened the hidden Trump portrait to “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Nothing Bush has said aloud, in Weisberg’s account, holds his genuine opinions; the canvases do. Other former presidents have occasionally spoken up about Trump’s policies, Weisberg said, and Bush could have done the same — yet he will not say Trump’s name, sheltering instead behind the idea that former presidents must remove themselves from commenting altogether. Their ideological differences aside, a far warmer rapport seems to connect Bush with his Democratic counterparts than with Trump.
From McConnell to Bezos: Eight Collaborators
Appearing on NPR’s Morning Edition with host Steve Inskeep on September 14, Weisberg narrowed down what the title means. “I’m talking about a particular kind. I’m talking about civic cowardice,” he said. The people he writes about are not opponents of Trump’s politics, he said, but figures who failed to push back when the president exceeded his constitutional power — against “Trump’s dictatorial behavior, his governing by emergency decree and executive order.”
Eight public figures fill the book, each cast by Weisberg as a collaborator who helped return Trump to power and entrench him there. Among them are former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Chief Justice John Roberts and Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock. Inskeep noted that the book opens with a Mark Twain epigraph, which Weisberg read aloud: “It is curious, curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
Trump’s second impeachment trial, after the January 6 attack, needed 67 of the 100 senators to convict; a guilty verdict would then have cleared the path to a separate majority vote barring him from future office. The tally came up 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 the day’s events and pointing to the courts as the proper venue. Roberts wrote the majority opinion three and a half years later, in July 2024, granting former presidents absolute immunity for their core constitutional powers and at least presumptive immunity for other official acts. That ruling unwound multiple prosecutions, and Weisberg criticizes it sharply.
Weisberg begins the book with Brad Karp, then chairman of the law firm Paul Weiss, and the only one of the eight who agreed to be interviewed. The president targeted the firm in March 2025, and Karp settled within five days on terms that included $40 million worth of pro bono representation for causes Trump backs. Weisberg says he sympathizes with the pressure Karp faced but calls the capitulation a disastrous decision. Karp resigned the chairmanship in February 2026, though he remains a partner.
Megyn Kelly is profiled as well: she challenged Trump over his history of misogyny at the start of the 2016 cycle, then endorsed him in 2024 as what she called a protector of women. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos draws a chapter, having killed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 and overhauled the paper’s Opinion section. Weisberg says his aim is to understand such choices rather than simply condemn them.
Trump’s History With Unflattering Portraits
Unflattering portraits have irritated Trump before. In a Truth Social post in March 2025 he attacked Colorado Gov. Jared Polis over a portrait hanging in the state Capitol; the image, he complained, had been “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” Sarah Boardman, who painted both, had also painted former President Obama, Trump wrote, “and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst.” That June his team donated a replacement based on his official photograph.
Weisberg returned to the Bush question on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, September 14. Host Jonathan Lemire put the counterfactual plainly: Bush was the one Republican whose voice, used after January 6 and before Trump’s comeback, might have carried enough weight to change other Republicans’ minds. “But yet Bush stayed silent,” Lemire said.
A Fresh Trump Jab at Bush World
Friction between Trump and the Bush orbit resurfaced the same day through Karl Rove, a former White House adviser to Bush. Rove said that morning he would cast a Democratic ballot in order to vote against Bo French, the Republican candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, citing French’s remarks about South Asian students at the University of Texas. Hours later Trump wrote on Truth Social that Rove is “so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often,” said he suffers from a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, asked why Fox News and The Wall Street Journal keep his voice alive, and called him “a stone cold loser.”
Weisberg is not asking Bush to become a full-time critic, and says nobody expects ex-presidents to respond to every development. Bush’s quiet, though, belongs to 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 interview, he linked that silence to Trump having “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.