Former president George W. Bush does not plan on endorsing a presidential candidate this cycle or publicly disclosing how he and his wife Laura will be voting.
“President Bush retired from presidential politics years ago,” Bush’s office told NBC News. Bush voted for his former secretary of state Condolezza Rice for president in 2020 after he and his wife did not support Trump or Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in 2016.
His former vice president Dick Cheney revealed Friday that he will be supporting Vice President Kamala Harris over former president Donald Trump.
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” Cheney said in a statement.
Cheney’s daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), is an outspoken critic of Trump and announced her support for Harris. She lost her seat in 2022 to a Trump-backed challenger after becoming a staunch critic of Trump because of his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
Reacting to both Cheney endorsements, Harris said she was “honored” to have their support and praised them for transcending partisan divisions. Democrats spent many years criticizing Dick Cheney’s aggressive approach to the Middle East and War on Terror, often making him out to be a super villain and a war criminal.
Now, Harris’s campaign is attempting to court moderate Republicans whose votes are potentially up for grabs because of their disdain for Trump. A number of those voters backed former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in the GOP primary, who has endorsed Trump since dropping out of the race and urged the former president to do more to court her supporters.
For his part, Trump casted Dick Cheney as a “Republican in name only” and blasted his foreign policy record, two themes of Trump’s political career for the better part of a decade.
“Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO, along with his daughter, who lost by the largest margin in the History of Congressional Races!” Trump said Friday night on Truth Social.
“He’s the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III! What Liz Cheney did with the Unselect Committee of Political Losers is unthinkable,” he added, referring to the younger Cheney’s work on the January 6th committee last congress.
Trump’s running mate, Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio) similarly attacked Liz Cheney for her devotion to “sending other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts” over all else.