Illustration by Doug Chayka; Source photographs from GettyIn the years since leaving office, George W. Bush has gone almost entirely silent about the political life of the nation he once led—and, most notably, about the man who has disparaged him and his family, and ousted them from the center of the Republican Party. In an essay published today, drawn from the forthcoming book “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era,” the journalist Jacob Weisberg argues that Bush’s refusal to speak plainly about the threats posed by Donald Trump at several key moments represents “the final, damning failure” of his own Presidency.Instead, the former President spends his time painting. His many portraits, which have evolved from a rudimentary form of outsider art to something more technically proficient and evocative, may be the clearest expressions of how he sees his legacy, and what he thinks about the current course of the country. Over the years, Bush has produced a series showing wounded military veterans, and another celebrating the achievements of immigrants to the United States, and is at work on a project about freedom fighters, including women who resisted the Taliban in Afghanistan. These works represent a strange contradiction, Weisberg writes, as a form of “political commentary that he won’t acknowledge as political.”And so, once again, what about the current occupant of the White House? On this, Weisberg offers a tantalizing bit of reporting: in the summer of 2025, there was “a big, ugly portrait of President Donald J. Trump” in Bush’s studio, according to someone who saw it. A spokesman for Bush declined to comment on the painting’s existence.Protesters in New York City during the summer of 2020.Photograph by Richard Jopson / Camera Press / ReduxAs people look to distance themselves from activists’ demands for police reform in 2020, the number of people killed by police across the country has continued to grow. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor considers the reckoning with the “woke” years. Read or listen to the story »More Top Stories“The Supreme Court is like ranked-choice voting or Jdate: how you feel about it depends on whether it’s delivering what you want,” Daniel Immerwahr writes. How much power should it have? Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, and cultural critic, died yesterday, at the age of ninety-two. In 2022, Dorothy Wickenden visited Berry at his Kentucky farm, and reviewed his decades of activism. “He found a kind of salvation, and a subject, in stewardship of the land,” she writes. Read Berry’s poem “The Loved Ones,” published in our pages in 2025. “The loved ones we call the dead / depart from us and for a while / are absent. And then as if / called back by our love, they come / near us again.” The most-clicked item in yesterday’s newsletter was about a family torn apart by vaccine skepticism.