They’re careful, she and Jenna. They have made clear over the years that they’re not perfect political overlaps with the rest of their family, which is the Republican Party’s great modern dynasty. Barbara, for example, appeared in a video endorsing same-sex marriage back in 2011.

Image Barbara, left, and Jenna in Kennebunkport, Me., in 1991. Credit... George Bush Presidential Library and Museum

But that’s not the kind of attention they usually court, and during our hours together at Café Altro Paradiso, where Jenna had ricotta dumplings and Barbara swordfish, they repeatedly registered their disgust with the divisiveness of our national conversation. They don’t want to add to the ugliness, which pains Jenna all the more, she said, because she has two daughters, Mila, 4, and Poppy, 2.

“This moment, as a mother, feels a little frightening, because I’m nervous to have the TV on to hear some of the rhetoric that is coming from the highest position,” Jenna said, conspicuously not uttering the syllable “Trump” itself. “The way I speak about elections and the way I speak about everything has changed, because I’m now a role model to two little humans who I want to teach about love and empathy and compassion.”

She and Barbara, who is single, woke up together in Jenna’s bed on the morning after election night, because Jenna’s husband, Henry Hager, was away, and Barbara had come over to watch the returns, which were still being counted into the wee hours. Jenna wouldn’t say if those results disappointed her, but she and Barbara both expressed a fierce wish to see a female president soon.

“One hundred percent,” Jenna said, and again mentioned her girls. “Mila, the other day in the car, goes, ‘Mommy, Poppy rules the world,’ about her baby sister. And I go: ‘Well, Poppy could rule the world. Maybe one day she could be president.’ And Mila goes, ‘But, Mom, presidents are men.’ She said that.”

From mid-1999 to late-2001 I covered their father’s campaign and the start of his presidency, and I remember seeing them on the fringes of events. I also remember the media’s sometimes cheap fascination with them when they went off to college — Jenna to the University of Texas, Barbara to Yale — and were repeatedly caught consuming alcohol before they were legally old enough to.