The 43rd president is feeling glum. “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president,” he told a gathering of former aides back in April, according to CNN.
Back in the aughts, some liberals (I won’t name names) wondered whether Bush’s foreign misadventures might stem from a dispensationalist yearning for end-times, and the safe rapture of all believers into the Kingdom of Heaven. As it turns out he was just a horribly misguided policymaker, and didn’t realize that the only Armageddon he was hastening was the one his own party is going through now.
From the vantage point of July, when Fox News chief Roger Ailes has been fired and the Republican National Convention is a shambles, Bush’s fears seem prescient. This week, the election forecasting website FiveThirtyEight published a feature called “The End of a Republican Party.” Data journalists there give George W. Bush a 62.8 percent chance of being the last Republican president*.
(*Melania Trump wrote this sentence)