President Trump has never had a very cozy relationship with the House of Bush. In the Republican primaries, Trump made it his mission to destroy Jeb (!), his sworn enemy. And to his credit, Trump was one of the few 2016 Republican candidates to publicly admit that the whole Iraq War thing was kind of a fuck-up (even if he still lies about his own timeline with his revelation). Yet the man in charge of that debacle, President George W. Bush, never called the press an "enemy of the people" when it (belatedly) turned on him as things all went to hell. Bush had an enduring respect for the role of a free, independent press in a democratic republic, something he emphasized, again, in an interview on the TODAY Show this morning:

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"One of the things I spent a lot of time doing was trying to convince a person like Vladimir Putin, for example, to accept the notion of an independent press," the 43rd president told Matt Lauer. "It's kind of hard to tell others to have an independent, free press when we're not willing to have one ourselves."

He added: "Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive, and it's important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power." Looks like we're about to put all that to the test.

From: Esquire US