THE STORY

Past US presidents don’t criticise the present office holder. That’s always been the unwritten rule.

In the new world of President Donald Trump, however, things are changing.

Within hours of each other Barack Obama and George W Bush, Democrat and Republican, have stepped up to the plate to send a clear message that Trump’s divisive politics are not what America wants or needs.

It prompted the Washington Post to declare: “That Trump’s two most recent predecessors felt liberated, or perhaps compelled, to re-enter the political arena in a manner that offered an implicit criticism of him is virtually unprecedented in modern politics.”

SO WHAT HAVE THEY SAID?

Obama called on fellow Democrats to reject the politics of “division” and “fear”.

Stepping into the political spotlight for the first time since leaving the White House in January, Obama told a rally in Virginia in front of thousands of supporters: “Why are we deliberately trying to misunderstand each other, and be cruel to each other and put each other down? That’s not who we are.”

Obama, who was campaigning with the party’s gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, added: “Our democracy’s at stake, and it’s at stake right here in Virginia.”

He went on: “Some of the politics we see now we thought we put that to bed. That’s folks looking 50 years back. It’s the 21st century, not the 19th century.” The first black president offered himself as proof that the country could move forward, telling the crowd in the former Capitol of the Confederacy, that he is a distant relative of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis on his mother’s side.

“Think about that,” Obama said. “I’ll bet he’s spinning in his grave.”

On the same day his predecessor, and Trump’s fellow Republican George W Bush denounced bigotry in Trump-era American politics, warning that the rise of “nativism”, isolationism and conspiracy theories have clouded the nation’s true identity.

Bush said: “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism, forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America.”

“We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade, forgetting that conflict, instability and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.

“We’ve seen the return of isolation sentiments, forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places.

“We’ve seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. Bigotry seems emboldened.

“Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.”

He continued: “We need to recall and recover our own identity. To renew our country, we only need to remember our values.”

The comment about identity was one of several that warned of what Bush described as troubling political trends, a clear dig at Trump.

DID THEY NAME TRUMP?

Obama did not mention Trump in his two campaign speeches which were made in support of the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey.

But he did tell crowds that they could send a message to the rest of the country in the forthcoming elections.

Bush, the 43rd president, did not name Trump either, but he clearly attacked some of the principles that define the 45th president’s political brand.

His comments, at a New York City conference, were a clear critique from a former Republican president who has remained largely silent during Trump’s unlikely rise to power and also kept his counsel in the eight years that Obama was in the White House after him.

WHAT’S THE REACTION BEEN?

Asked about Bush’s speech, Trump said he had not seen it. Presidential historian and author Robert Dallek said Bush was taking aim at Trump’s “roiling of the traditional institutions of the country and, in particular, demeaning the office of the president by a kind of crude or vulgar bashing of opponents.

“I think this is Bush throwing down the gauntlet.”

He added that the discretion former presidents traditionally afforded successors is “fading to the past because of the belligerence of Trump.”

And Richard Fontaine, who served on the National Security Council under Bush said his former boss’s speech was a clear bid to recentre US politics on post-1945 values such as tolerance, democracy and human rights.