Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator.

I'm joined today by Jim Antle, who is politics editor for the Washington Examiner,

and we're going to be talking about

the furious war within the Republican Party and the strange rehabilitation of George W. Bush.

So Jim, President George W. Bush gave a speech yesterday in which he seemed to be taking not very

subtle pot shots at President Trump and the sort of ethno-nationalism of Trump's movement.

Is it fair to say the Republican Party is at war with itself at the moment?

Well, I think ever since Donald Trump came on the scene, there's been something of a civil

war within the Republican Party. I think you could argue that Trump's presidential campaign was a hostile takeover of the party.

Now, obviously, some of this predates Trump in that there was a lot of discontent among the

grassroots, I think, with the agenda that was being pursued by the party's governing class and the party's donor class,

which people refer to as being the Republican establishment.

I think if you're going to define the Republican establishment in any way, it would be that.

It would be the people who give the party money, the party strategists, and the people who are involved in governing, whether that's the congressional leadership or people who are Republican bureaucrats when they hold the White House.

Those groups within the party never supported Trump.

And in fact, they organized against them to some extent during the primaries,

and many of them withheld their support even in the general election. And that was very true

of people around George W. Bush, Trump's ideological agenda to the extent that he was ideological,

was a reaction to some of Bush's innovations on

conservatism, which were a little bit more friendly to immigration, a little bit adopting a

lower threshold for the use of U.S. military force, some nation-building exercises of Trump, some extent was a reaction against all of that.

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