Donald Trump Seeks Republican Unity but Finds Rejection

On Friday, Mr. Bush’s disavowal of Mr. Trump landed as a bitter blow. The former Florida governor is revered among party veterans and has one of the most powerful fund-raising networks in Republican politics. In a statement, Mr. Bush said his former opponent lacked the “temperament or strength of character” to serve as president.

.. The populist Manhattan businessman responded with a statement savaging Mr. Graham, a senior spokesman for the party on national security. Mr. Trump boasted that he had “destroyed his hapless run for president” and consigned Mr. Graham to the political ash heap.

.. “While I will unify the party, Lindsey Graham has shown himself to be beyond rehabilitation,” Mr. Trump said.

.. Mr. Trump’s belittling attack poses a new challenge for a party already riven by frustration and indecision over his campaign.

.. Mr. Trump conceded in a television interview on Friday morning that he had been surprised by Mr. Ryan’s rebuke, and he sounded exasperated by the party leadership’s unwillingness to rally to his candidacy. “You talk about unity,” Mr. Trump said, “but what is this?”

.. Mr. Trump conceded in a television interview on Friday morning that he had been surprised by Mr. Ryan’s rebuke, and he sounded exasperated by the party leadership’s unwillingness to rally to his candidacy. “You talk about unity,” Mr. Trump said, “but what is this?”

What George H. W. Bush Got Wrong

When we rank, reconsider, laud, or denounce past Presidents, living or dead, we are taking stock of our own times. In that sense, the vindication of George H. W. Bush is a reflection of what we know we’ve lost. Jon Meacham’s new biography of Bush, “Destiny and Power,” makes that plain from its very first pages. “Americans unhappy with the reflexively polarized politics of the first decades of the twenty-first century will find the presidency of George H.W. Bush refreshing, even quaint,” Meacham writes in his prologue.

.. But there is more at work here than Meacham acknowledges, and it has to be weighed in any full accounting of Bush’s life and leadership. Bush shrank from defending the tax increase, in part, because he had always shrunk from challenging, in any principled, public way, his party’s right wing.

.. The woman refused to shake the Vice-President’s hand. Bush complained in his diary:

There’s something terrible about those who carry it to extremes. They’re scary. They’re there for spooky, extraordinary right-winged reasons. They don’t care about Party. They don’t care about anything. They’re the excesses. They could be Nazis, they could be Communists, they could be whatever. In this case, they’re religious fanatics and they’re spooky. They will destroy this party if they’re permitted to take over.

.. Bush deplored the rightward lurch of the G.O.P., but lacked the will or the fire to fight for its future. He did not, in the phrase of William F. Buckley, Jr., “stand athwart history, yelling Stop”; he tried, instead, to go with the flow. The fact that Bush disbelieved some of the dogma he espoused is not, in the end, exculpatory.