‘Morally indefensible’ - but George W Bush will not come out against Trump

The MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell this week hit out at George W Bush, the Republican former president, for refusing to weigh in on America's looming presidential election.

"All any decent person wants him to do is to say, 'Don't vote for Donald Trump, and here's why,' and he won't even do that," O'Donnell told the Fast Politics podcast, of the Republican president who was in office from 2001 to 2009.

Increasingly, Bush - and some other top Republicans from his political era - are looking lonely in their ongoing refusal to take a side in an election in which many have warned that US democracy is under threat from Trump's open sympathies with autocracy.

Bush's vice-president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, whose January 6 committee role cost her a US House seat in Wyoming, have endorsed Kamala Harris. So have other senior Republicans, including more than 100 who this week signed a letter declaring that Trump, their party's nominee for a third election running, must never return to the White House.

"We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, serious and steady leader," the officials said. "We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not."

Big-name signatories included Chuck Hagel, a former senator and defense secretary; Gen Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA chief; and John Negroponte, once ambassador to the UN. Robert Zoellick, a longtime aide to both presidents Bush and a deputy to James Baker, secretary of state to the elder Bush, was on the list too.

Missing from the list, however, were Baker, the younger Bush and his own secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. As perhaps the three most senior Republicans who have not come out against Trump in this election cycle, Bush, Rice and Baker's lack of comment excites growing comment itself.