Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect new developments.

The conventional wisdom regarding Donald Trump’s staff shake-up this week—which saw the departure of the beleaguered Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—was that Trump was coming into his own, surrounding himself with like-minded “America First” hawks and populists after a year of giving representatives of the Republican establishment a voice in the Oval Office. Coming a week after Trump unilaterally imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, Tillerson’s departure pulled “the Trump administration further out of the economic and foreign policy mainstream,” The New York Times wrote, adding, “It also suggests that after a year of chaotic on-the-job training, Mr. Trump has developed more confidence in his own instincts.” Other establishment figures, like National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, are reportedly on their way out.

But if this represented a break from the Republican mainstream, the names that surfaced in the headlines this week were awfully familiar. Gina Haspel, who once controlled her own CIA black site in Thailand, is Trump’s pick to lead the CIA. If confirmed she’ll replace Mike Pompeo, who was nominated to replace Tillerson. John Bolton, the hawk who was George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, is rumored to be McMaster’s replacement.

In major respects, Trump’s presidency is following outlines chalked out by Bush, the cowboy-in-chief whose populist appeal was enhanced by his belligerent foreign policy. On issues ranging from torture to immigration to abortion, Trump is reviving the bad old days of the Bush administration. (Bush even imposed tariffs on steel, a largely forgotten appeal to the American manufacturing industry that shows just how unoriginal Trump supposed iconoclasm really is.) Trump is no deviation, no mutation, no surprise. He is a continuation.

Bush has lately enjoyed a rehabilitation, though he didn’t have to work very hard for it. “Sorta makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it?” Bush reportedly said of Trump. Some politicians and pundits seem to agree with him. “I’m so sorry, President Bush,” Nancy Pelosi said after mistakenly referring to Trump by Bush’s name. “I never thought I would pray for the day that you are president again.” When Bush in 2017 accused Trump of promoting a “nationalism distorted into nativism,” CNN said that he’d given Trump “a verbal lapel-shaking.”