President Donald Trump seems generally untroubled by the Bush name on the resumes of Health and Human Services chief Alex Azar and some other top administration officials. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images White House 'Bushies' creep into Trump's administration Trump is suspicious of people who have worked for the Bush family, but has little choice but to keep hiring them — to the anger of some hard-core supporters.

President Donald Trump uses the term “Bushie” as shorthand for anyone he considers too establishment, thinks too conventionally, or is just, in the president’s mind, a pain.

But a strange thing has been happening within his administration lately. Bush administration alums now run huge swaths of Trump’s government. They’re at high levels of his departments of Homeland Security, Labor, State, Health and Human Services, and Treasury. At the White House, they staff his legal and domestic policy offices.


It’s a trend that unsettles some hard-core conservatives who backed Trump because he was anything but a typical Bush-style party man.

“And Trump wonders why he can’t get anything done,” said one former Trump transition official, who alleges that Trump’s senior staff has walled off campaign loyalists from top jobs. “It was hard in January 2018 to imagine Trump senior personnel decision-making to get any worse. But it has.”

Earlier this month, Trump picked Bill Barr, an attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, as his replacement for Jeff Sessions. Two of his recent hires for the White House counsel’s office, Mike Purpura and Pat Philpin, served under President George W. Bush. They will report to the new White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who served in the elder Bush’s Justice Department.

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Meanwhile, the newly confirmed deputy secretary of the Treasury Department, Justin Muzinich, worked on Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign and helped draft his tax plan. Trump’s pick to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Heath Tarbert, served as an associate counsel to George W. Bush — a fact unmentioned in a recent White House announcement of his nomination. Jim Jeffrey, a former senior aide in George W. Bush’s White House, became Trump's U.S. special representative to Syria in August.

And then there’s Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — a former George W. Bush White House aide who liked Bush so much he later served as his personal lawyer.

What some call a sellout is just a recognition of reality, others argue. Many Republicans say Trump has no choice but to look beyond #MAGA true believers, especially as his administration enters its third year and looks to refill top White House and Cabinet positions requiring specialized experience. According to a Brookings Institution analysis , Trump has had far more turnover among his senior staff and Cabinet officials than any of his past three predecessors.

“You’ve got a lot of jobs to fill,” said Tevi Troy, who held senior domestic policy jobs in the George W. Bush administration. “You go where there are people who have the qualification.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to requests for comment.

One Republican close to the White House described the problem as a “demographic issue,” particularly when it comes to Washington’s conservative legal community. Another Republican adviser noted that the two Bush administrations spanned 12 of the past 30 years.

Trump was nothing but respectful toward the Bush family during George H.W. Bush’s funeral this month. But that has hardly always been the case.

One former White House official said Trump’s use of ‘Bushie’ as an epithet dates to the 2016 campaign, when Trump savaged Jeb Bush, then seen as the GOP front-runner. More generally, Trump has used the Bush family’s establishment views as a foil for his own unconventional approach to issues ranging from immigration to trade to foreign policy. (“The last thing our country needs is another BUSH,” Trump tweeted in December 2015.)

Inside the Trump orbit, an us-and-them mentality continues. One former administration official said Trump officials and allies often “use the ‘Bush’ term to their advantage” by reminding Trump and his senior aides of an internal rival’s ties to the Republican clan.

One Republican close to the White House referred to it as a “weapon” sometimes deployed in and around the West Wing.

Trump doesn’t always need the prompting. Since taking office, he has often expressed suspicion toward officials in his administration with ties to past Bush White Houses, questioning their loyalty and dedication to his policies. One repeated target is his Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, whom Trump has suspected is soft on immigration in part because she served as a special assistant to the president under George W. Bush. (Her relationship with Trump has improved in recent weeks, said one Republican close to the White House, thanks to her more public-facing, tough-on-immigration rhetoric.)

At times, the same suspicions dogged Trump’s former deputy chief of staff for operations, Joe Hagin, who held the same job for years under George W. Bush. A second Trump White House aide said Hagin, knowing that the president was skeptical of that service, often kept a low profile, focused on his portfolio of White House operations, and avoided interacting with Trump on a daily basis inside the Oval Office.

One Republican close to the White House disputed that characterization, saying Hagin traveled with the president on his trips overseas and often to Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, N.J.

So many Bushies now pervade the administration that not all Bush connections irk Trump, according to another former senior administration official. He seems generally untroubled by the Bush name on the résumés of his Labor secretary, Alex Acosta; Health and Human Services chief, Alex Azar; or Scott Gottlieb, who runs the Food and Drug Administration — though they all work at agencies and consequently do not spend as much time in the White House as some.

Nor has it been an issue, said one former White House aide, with Treasury’s Muzinich, who has served in the Trump administration since early 2017 and played a significant role in White House’s singular legislative achievement: last year’s passage of a tax reform bill.

Hiring loyal staffers to carry out the Trump agenda has been a frequent battle inside the Trump orbit, dating back to the transition. After Trump’s historic upset in the 2016 presidential campaign, loyalists and campaign staffers were irked, just weeks later, to find the West Wing staffed with establishment Republicans like chief of staff Reince Priebus, alums of Capitol Hill, and New Yorkers like National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn — many of whom had not worked in the campaign trenches. Priebus and Cohn have since left.

The perennial fight over hiring loyalists versus more typical D.C. conservatives tends to kick up whenever major personnel changes loom — like now, as Trump prepares to swap out his chief of staff and senior aides continue to depart the White House after a grueling two years.

What’s at stake now is the makeup of the White House and top administration posts as Trump enters a two-year period of divided government, ongoing investigations and a reelection bid.

In addition to the presence of Bushies, what remains concerning to Trump loyalists and conservatives are hires such as Mary Kissel , a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer who has disparaged Trump. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hired Kissel as a senior adviser last month.

Jeffrey, a deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush, signed a “Never Trump” letter during the 2016 campaign that declared that Trump “lacks the character, values and experience to be President.” (In a September briefing, Jeffrey, Trump's special representative for Syria engagement, said of Trump’s Syria policy, “those of us working on this agenda feel that he has our back.”)

But the Bush alums continue to feel strongly about serving their country regardless of who is president, said Blain Rethmeier, a former aide in George W. Bush’s White House and Department of Justice.

“For many of the Trump loyalists and those with a more populist mentality, they may see 'Bushie' as a derogatory term, but history has been very kind to George W. Bush, and we saw a lot of that, too, with the passing of H.W. Bush,” Rethmeier said. “Whether you see that as a badge of honor depends on where you see yourself in the spectrum of the Republican Party.”