George W Bush delivered a rare, if veiled, rebuke to Donald Trump on Thursday, criticising the US president without explicitly mentioning him by name.
Speaking at a summit hosted by the George W Bush Institute in New York, the former president warned that bigotry and nativism had taken hold in America, and called for a restoration of the values that had defined the country’s history.
His speech appeared to refer to the most significant controversies that have dogged Mr Trump’s first year in office — Mr Trump’s response to a white nationalist march in Charlottesville when he blamed the subsequent violence on both the nationalists and protesters; his loose relationship with the truth; his impulse to blow up longstanding US alliances and positions on free trade and globalism; and his efforts to curb immigration, either by travel ban or a wall on the US-Mexico border.