In the last few days, journalistic eulogies have abounded for George H. W. Bush, who died at the age of 94 on Friday night. It’s established tradition for honoring former presidents. But as Jon Allsop points out in The Columbia Journalism Review, the warm remembrances of Bush also display a distinct trend: evaluating the forty-first president specifically as a foil who highlights the perceived failings of the current commander in chief.

Coverage of Bush’s life, Allsop notes, has been “dominated by favorable comparisons to President Trump. Bush’s death, much like McCain’s before him, became a metaphor for the death of civility in politics. A warm letter Bush wrote his successor, Bill Clinton, was held up as an artifact of bipartisan comity, as BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen noted in an insightful post. Many outlets highlighted Bush’s broad public popularity ... And on cable news, in particular, commentators portrayed Bush as an honorable man who did politics the nice way. On CNN, Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Bush, summed up much coverage when he said, ‘Politics need not be mean and nasty, and he lived by that.’”

There are genuine reasons to praise Bush. Although he could be brutally demagogic when running for office—aside from the racist “Willie Horton” ad released by his allies, Bush’s 1988 campaign relied on the portrayal of Bush as a true American who loved the Pledge of Allegiance, as opposed to the unpatriotic “Greek” Michael Dukakis—Bush was an institutionalist who tried to make government work. That meant reaching across the aisle and working with Democrats in a way that now seems inconceivable, leading to the passage of Americans With Disability Act, the amendment of Clean Air Act, and accepting tax increases to lower the deficit. Bush’s institutionalist instincts also stood him in good stead in foreign policy, where he dealt with world-changing events like the end of the Cold War and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by deftly deploying alliances and international organizations like NATO and the United Nations.

At the core of Bush nostalgia, Franklin Foer argues in The Atlantic, is a yearning for an older, more responsible “Establishment.” Specifically, an older elite, “hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by the late-night rituals of Skull and Bones, sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige,” Foer writes. “For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system. Now it is gone, and apparently people wish it weren’t.”

Still, to remember Bush only for his successes ignores the grievous faults of that Establishment—particularly its cruelty towards socially marginal groups. Foer, along with David Greenberg writing in Politico, does well to remind readers how Bush opportunistically opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in his failed bid to win a congressional seat in Texas. As a member of the Reagan administration, he opposed sanctioning Apartheid South Africa. The Willie Horton ad is rightly seen as a precursor to Donald Trump’s race-baiting politics.