It’s Now Donald Trump’s America. But George Bush’s Stamp Endures.

By Peter Baker
Dec. 1, 2018

BUENOS AIRES — Former President George Bush’s legacy was on display just hours before his death. President Trump signed a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that was the next generation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Mr. Bush first negotiated nearly three decades ago.

As Mr. Trump scrawled his name on the document on Friday, however, he chose not to frame the accord as building on Mr. Bush’s accomplishment, but as tearing it down. Rather than the natural update of Nafta, he characterized it as the replacement for a disastrous agreement. “The terrible NAFTA will soon be gone,” he declared on Twitter.

If ever there was a moment when it was clear that Mr. Bush’s America has given way to Mr. Trump’s America, this is it. Mr. Bush’s death at age 94 is the end of an era, the passing of the last of the World War II and Cold War generation to serve as president and the fading of an approach to public life overtaken by the politics of anger, grievance and polarization.

Yet however much he wants to dismantle it, Mr. Trump is still operating within the framework that Mr. Bush helped establish. While he disparaged Nafta, Mr. Trump ultimately accepted Mr. Bush’s fundamental concept of knitting together the three great nations of North America in a single, integrated trade bloc. The alliances that Mr. Bush built and bolstered remain in place, however frayed. And a host of civil rights, environmental and other Bush-era laws still govern America.

“He was a very fine man. I met him on a number of occasions,” Mr. Trump, who was in Buenos Aires meeting with world leaders, told reporters shortly after calling former President George W. Bush and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida to offer condolences. “He was a terrific guy, and he’ll be missed. He lived a full life and an exemplary life.”

His words of admiration belied a history of animosity with the Bush family. Mr. Trump eviscerated Jeb Bush during the 2016 Republican primaries and regularly disparaged George W. Bush. The elder Mr. Bush refused to support Mr. Trump in the fall election, voting instead for Hillary Clinton. The younger George Bush has said he voted for none of the above.

George Herbert Walker Bush led the country and the world through a hinge point in history as decades of superpower rivalry came to a close in a remarkably peaceful way and the United States emerged as the dominant force on the planet. With the reunification of Germany, he helped redraw the map of Europe, and he set in motion a drastic reduction in the world’s largest nuclear arsenals.

His foray into the Middle East successfully ousted Iraq from Kuwait but entangled the United States in the region in a way that would later prove disastrous when George W. Bush sent troops to Baghdad. And his broken “read my lips” promise not to raise taxes and his inability to hold off a recession spelled his political doom as voters rejected him for a second term in 1992.

Arguably, that moment proved a precursor to this one as conservatives angry at his apostasy, led by a onetime backbench congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich, rose to power within the Republican Party and toppled the old establishment. The harder-edged Gingrich revolution in some ways foreshadowed Mr. Trump’s extraordinary takeover of the party.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/u...e-history.html