Presidents Behaving Badly
As we struggle to understand dysfunctional globalism, we must ask why Bush Republicans and the Democrats have joined to protect past presidents.
Charles Ortel | March 24, 2026
Before Washington, DC became America’s capital city, a large swath of land to the south was known as the “Dismal Swamp,” a place where insect-borne diseases and other perils felled early settlers. Construction since these early times has transformed the surface of the capital and nearby suburbs in the Beltway, but the threat posed by the festering swamp of unelected individuals who hold levers of power, important ones, in our vast government bureaucracy and infect the body politic has only risen.
Self-anointed “insiders” and their family members pull down compensation and other benefits from a maze of entities, posing as foundations or institutes, that boldly flout settled laws and regulations, but are never punished. If you’re wondering about what’s going on today, it’s worth looking back to how hard the George W. Bush presidency worked to protect his predecessors from scrutiny, especially on matters related to the Iran-Contra affair.
Days after the National Archivist worked with the Department of Justice and the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago, I wondered what a librarian might have to fear about Donald Trump’s return to power in 2025. For years, I also mulled over why President Trump repeatedly and haplessly managed to pick manifestly ineffective people to lead the Department of Justice as Attorney General, culminating in his first term with George H.W. Bush loyalist Bill Barr.
Back then, I was not aware of how far Presidents might go to bury inconvenient truths about their tenure in the White House. In the years that have passed, what former presidents say and what they do not write about in their overpaid memoirs has helped me get closer to the truth. The Clinton presidency and the decades since then help clarify this issue.
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