Former President George W. Bush is keeping a canvas hidden from public view, according to journalist Jacob Weisberg — a portrait of President Donald Trump that nobody is permitted to see. Bush has “painted a really ugly picture of Trump, which he won’t show to anybody,” Weisberg said in an interview published Monday, September 14, 2026.
Weisberg, the author of the bestselling “Bushisms,” which cataloged Bush’s verbal stumbles in office, remarked Michael Calderone, deputy editor of Intelligencer, while discussing his newly released book, “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.” He faults the silence of the only living former Republican president, arguing that Bush has done too little to confront Trump.
Art Therapy in the Post-Presidency
Bush took up painting after leaving the White House, and Weisberg contends the brush has become a substitute for the microphone. “He’s expressing all of his feelings through painting, this kind of art therapy,” Weisberg said. Bush paints wounded veterans and immigrants, he said, in an attempt to engage with politics without ever stating his views explicitly.
Weisberg compared the hidden Trump portrait to “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” arguing that Bush’s real views live in the artwork rather than in anything he has said aloud. Other former presidents have occasionally spoken up about Trump’s policies, Weisberg said, and Bush could have and should have done the same — but will not say Trump’s name. Instead, Weisberg said, Bush hides behind the notion that former presidents must remove themselves entirely from commenting. Despite their ideological differences, Bush appears to enjoy a far warmer rapport with his Democratic counterparts than with Trump.
Eight Collaborators, From McConnell to Bezos
The book profiles eight figures Weisberg casts as collaborators who helped return Trump to power and entrench him there. He ranks former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Chief Justice John Roberts as tied for the worst of them, saying the two effectively worked in tandem even without coordinating.
After the January 6 attack, 67 senators could have voted to convict Trump in impeachment proceedings and bar him from running again. McConnell declined to reconvene the Senate before Joe Biden was sworn in, then voted against conviction while holding Trump responsible for provoking the insurrection and pointing to the criminal justice system as the proper venue. Roughly 40 months later, Roberts wrote the majority opinion holding that former presidents have absolute immunity for official acts in office, a ruling that unwound multiple prosecutions and that Weisberg sharply criticizes.
Weisberg opens the book with Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul Weiss, in a chapter titled “The Existentialist.” In early 2025, after the president targeted the firm, Karp signed on to a deal whose terms included $40 million worth of pro bono representation for causes Trump backs — a bargain Weisberg says no law firm should have struck. The book also profiles Megyn Kelly, who challenged Trump over his history of misogyny at the start of the 2016 election cycle before endorsing him in 2024 as what she called a protector of women, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who killed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 and overhauled the paper’s Opinion section. His aim, Weisberg says, is to understand these choices rather than simply condemn them.
Trump’s History With Unflattering Portraits
Bush’s hidden canvas lands on a subject that has already irritated Trump. In 2025, Trump used Truth Social to blast Colorado Gov. Jared Polis over a portrait of himself hanging in the state Capitol alongside those of other presidents, complaining that the image had been purposefully distorted to a degree he had never seen. The same artist painted former President Obama, Trump wrote, and that portrait looked wonderful; he said he would rather have no picture at all, and that the governor should be ashamed of himself for allowing it. A portrait was later gifted to the Colorado Capitol by Trump’s team; the replacement appears to be a painting based on Trump’s official photograph, in which he wears a menacing expression.
A Fresh Trump Jab at Bush World
Friction between Trump and the Bush orbit resurfaced on Monday, September 14, when Trump wrote on Truth Social that Karl Rove, a former White House adviser to Bush, is bad for the Republican Party and frequently wrong. Trump said Rove suffers from a major case of what he called Trump Derangement Syndrome, dating the grievance to nearly a decade of beating back the causes Rove championed, and dismissed him as a loser kept relevant by Fox News. The post came after Rove said he would vote Democratic in order to cast a ballot against Bo French, a Republican candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission whom Rove described as a bigot. French’s opponent is Democrat Jon Rosenthal.
Weisberg is not asking Bush to become a full-time critic; nobody expects ex-presidents to respond to every development, he said. But he places Bush’s quiet in a specific category of failure. “There’s sins of commission and sins of omission,” Weisberg said, assigning Bush’s reluctance to criticize Trump publicly to the second. The painting, Weisberg says, remains where Bush has kept it: out of sight.