George P. Bush charts a Trumpian path as he tries to extend the family dynasty in Texas

George P. Bush has faced skepticism of his family name in Texas as he has tried to advance his political career in the Trump era. (Cooper Neill for The Washington Post)

SULPHUR SPRINGS, Tex. — It’s candidate night in Hopkins County and the regional civic center is filled with Republicans sizing up candidates ahead of Tuesday’s primary election. On the stage, George P. Bush is arguing why Texans should make him the state’s next attorney general rather than the scandal-plagued Republican incumbent, Ken Paxton.

Bush carries the name of a family once revered in the state, but these days that is a heavy burden in Texas. His issue agenda owes less to his allegiance to his family than to former president Donald Trump.

Bush tells the audience he has twice traveled the length of the Texas border and vows to “finish the Trump wall.” He speaks about “massive voter fraud.” He promises to go after human traffickers and drug cartels and to take on district attorneys in the big cities, who he says are not on the side of law enforcement. He decries “the wholesale indoctrination of our children when it comes to critical race theory” in public schools.

Bush has supporters in the audience, but here in conservative East Texas, skepticism of anyone named Bush is apparent. Such is the challenge he faces as he tries to advance his political career in the era of Trump. As people file out of the civic center after more than three hours of presentations by an array of candidates, a woman who did not want to give her name offered a biting critique of the Bush family. “I thought they were Republicans,” she said with a tone of sarcasm.

When Bush first declared his candidacy for a statewide office in 2013, the announcement was greeted in Texas as the arrival of a new-generation politician who could extend the influence of a family that had helped shape the Republican Party for decades. The younger Bush — grandson of one president, nephew of another and son of a two-term Florida governor long seen as a potential third President Bush — had grown up in a family for which public service seemed to come naturally. Politics was the family business, and George P. Bush appeared ideally suited to carry on the dynasty.

But Bush, now 45, has turned out to be anything but a pure knockoff of the Bushes of old. Instead, he has adapted to the new politics of the Republican Party. Rather than embracing the “kinder and gentler” approach of George H.W. Bush or the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush or the “fix-it” policy agenda of his father, Jeb Bush, George P. Bush has embraced the harder-edged conservatism of Trump and Trump himself.

Low-key as a campaigner and soft-spoken in more intimate settings, Bush calls his family heritage a blessing, but with a caveat. “I love all of my family members, and they inspired me to serve causes greater than self,” he said during an interview in between campaign appearances last week. “You know, I think my family’s picture in American politics is secure. But Texans know me as my own man, and my own family encouraged me to be my own man.”

In this campaign, he said, he is “addressing the current problems that face Texans right now, right here and right now, because, you know, the more that we talk about the past, I think we get burdened by the litigation and the wounds of the past.”

The arc of Bush’s political career embodies the story of what has happened to conservative politics in the Lone Star State since George W. Bush left the White House, as well as the trade-offs that ambitious politicians with establishment pedigrees confront as they try to navigate through the tumultuous Trump era.

Today, Bush’s political future — and with it, that of the Bush dynasty — is uncertain. Bush enjoys some of the benefits of his family name, relatively high name identification and access to money, for example. But today in Texas, being a Bush carries as many or more liabilities.

After two terms as Texas land commissioner, Bush is fighting to prevent Paxton, who is leading in the polls, from winning the nomination for attorney general outright with at least 50 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s primary. At the same time, he is doing all he can to ensure that, if there is a runoff in May, he will be the other candidate.

The family brand was built in Texas, where Yankee patrician George H.W. Bush moved from the East Coast to West Texas as a young man, made his money in the oil patch and then was elected to Congress from Houston in the late 1960s. But for the past decade or so, the Bush brand has been in decline. A defeat for George P. Bush in the attorney general’s race would put an exclamation point on that erosion.

Analysts differ on whether Bush can ultimately prevail over Paxton if there is a runoff, though more doubt his prospects. No matter the outcome, the younger Bush has already rewritten the family script. A new surname dominates politics in the Texas Republican Party — Trump — and Bush is gambling that by embracing the politics of the Trump GOP, he can survive and indeed thrive.

Eric Mahroum, a former Trump administration official who introduced George P. Bush at a campaign event in Garland last week, remembers vividly the day Bush enlisted in Trump’s political army. Jeb Bush had just dropped out of the 2016 Republican presidential race, having started as the nominal front-runner, only to be crushed by Trump’s relentless and at times humiliating attacks.

Mahroum, who was part of Trump’s Texas campaign at the time, said the younger Bush showed up at a meeting of the State Republican Executive Committee and surprised everyone with his sudden conversion.

Mahroum described what happened that day: “He says, ‘You know what? I’m asking everybody to get together, get behind candidate Trump as our nominee,’ and I remember looking around the room. People … were a little surprised because it was like, ‘Whoa!’ As hard as candidate Trump came after Jeb Bush and the rest of his family, his uncle, he put that aside and people were really impressed.”

For all the victories by others in his family and for all he witnessed and absorbed growing up, Bush today describes Trump as “a unique force in politics” whose influence continues almost unabated. “As somebody who ran two years before [Trump] came on the political scene,” Bush said, “I can say that … he electrified Republicans to a degree that I had never seen before in my life.”

When Bush announced his campaign for attorney general last year, his opening video paid tribute to the former president. “Under the leadership of President Trump, our country was strong and vibrant again,” he said in the video. At another point, he said, “Like President Trump, I will not sit idly by while our freedoms are under attack, because Texas must lead the way in fighting this radical agenda.” He did not mention anyone in his own family.

Opinions among Texas Republicans differ as to whether Bush believed he could win an endorsement from Trump or was mostly hoping to prevent Paxton from getting the former president’s support. Whichever it might have been, his efforts fell short. To the surprise of few, Trump gave his full support to Paxton, who in late 2020 filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election results in four swing states.

The Supreme Court dismissed the Paxton filing, saying Texas did not have standing to bring the suit. But the legal move drew support from Republicans around the country and endeared Paxton to Trump loyalists in the party’s base.

Trump’s support has helped make Paxton the front-runner in the race, even though he has been under indictment for securities fraud since 2015 and is facing an FBI investigation triggered by allegations from members of his senior staff. Those aides accused Paxton of abusing the powers of his office by helping an Austin real estate developer who was also a campaign contributor and who had hired a woman with whom Paxton was having an affair.

In all, eight members of Paxton’s senior staff left — five were fired and three resigned — and four of those fired have since filed a whistleblower suit against him. Last week, the four issued a statement that said, in part, “The most basic qualifications of an attorney general are respect for truth and respect for the law.” “Ken Paxton has neither.”

Paxton has denied all allegations, but some GOP strategists fear federal indictments could come after the primaries, which they say would threaten Paxton’s prospects in November’s general election.

Bush said if he makes the runoff against Paxton, he will once again seek Trump’s endorsement by trying to persuade the former president to rescind his support for Paxton. “When we get in the runoff, I will send a message to — and we maintain a line of communication with the Trump team — that this is his chance to get out of the race or support me in this race,” he said, “because if you really care about his policies, you got to nominate somebody that’s actually going to beat the Democrat.”

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said Bush would face long odds of defeating Paxton in a runoff, noting that, in polls, 2 in 5 Republican primary voters say they would never vote for Bush because of his last name. “It’s guilt by association with his uncle, his father and his grandfather, who today are seen as far too centrist for the party,” he said.

Another view, however, holds that the dynamic could go against Paxton, who could face a barrage of television ads focused on his legal problems, something he has avoided during the first round of the primary. But a low-turnout runoff would still be better for Paxton.

Two other candidates are also challenging Paxton in the primary: Rep. Louie Gohmert, who decided to seek the office out of disappointment with Paxton’s embattled tenure and what he saw as legal grandstanding; and Eva Guzman, a former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, who said in an interview that she was also “fed up with Paxton’s lack of integrity, lack of respect and lack of results.”

Current polling has shown Paxton running first, but it is not clear whether he will be able to get over the 50 percent threshold needed to win the nomination outright on Tuesday. Bush appears to be in second, ahead of Guzman, with Gohmert generally running fourth.

Gohmert is a hard-right conservative and Trump backer who has represented East Texas in Congress since 2005. His issues are border security and voting integrity. On Jan. 6, 2021, he voted to object to the certification of the electoral counts in Arizona and Pennsylvania, both states Joe Biden won in the presidential election. He has struggled to make his voice heard, but any votes he gets will come out of Paxton’s coalition, which is why the attorney general has attacked him in a TV ad.

Guzman has attracted conservative-establishment money, led by the Texans for Lawsuit Reform. Several newspapers in the state have endorsed her as well. She sees Bush blocking her path to a runoff and has attacked him as ill-prepared to be the state’s top lawyer. “He’s not qualified to keep Texas red,” she said just before a forum with Bush and Gohmert in Sulphur Springs last week. “He’s not qualified to take the fight to the Biden administration.” That night, Bush fired back at her for what he said was a “slanderous, libelous” campaign.

In an interview before the candidate forum, Gohmert spoke about what he sees as the deterioration of the Bush brand among conservatives, noting in particular George W. Bush’s support for the bailout of Wall Street financial firms as the economy was heading into a deep recession in 2008. He also pointed to the long-running war between the Bushes and Trump.

“Seeing the revered George H.W. Bush and George W. not really embracing the Republican candidates, not just Trump but appearing — whether they did or not — to support Democrats over the years,” he said. “I think that has done a little bit to sour some folks.”

Even before he was first elected, Bush had signaled that he was looking to the future of Texas conservatism, rather than the past, when he described Sen. Ted Cruz, a politician far more conservative than either Bush’s grandfather, father or uncle, as the future of the party. Weeks before the 2014 election, Bush was asked at a Texas Tribune conference whether, given what he had said about Cruz, he planned to support the senator’s expected 2016 presidential candidacy. Bush demurred, saying he intended to stay out of presidential politics.

But it was a follow-up question that truly rattled him and stunned the audience: Well, asked Evan Smith, chief executive of the Texas Tribune, would he support his father in 2016 if he were to run for president? Bush ducked, despite repeated and increasingly incredulous follow-up questioning by Smith.

“I think folks know that I love him,” Bush said of his father, adding: “My focus has to be on this agency [the Texas General Land Office]. If I’m entrusted by the voters of Texas to be land commissioner, that’s going to occupy my time.”

Smith responded by saying, “You know the headline tomorrow’s going to be, ‘George P. Bush: Too busy to endorse his dad.’”

Bush laughed awkwardly. “You caught me on that one,” he said.

Bush concedes now that it was a truly awkward moment. When Jeb Bush joined the race, his son fell in line and worked on his behalf. “I was proud to help my dad when he ran,” he said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.”

Yet still, he was taken by the force of Trump’s candidacy. He said the choice between Hillary Clinton and Trump persuaded him that it was vital that Trump win.

Others in the Bush family have not been so accommodating, often expressing their disdain for Trump and in some cases choosing not to vote for him. But family ties remain strong. George W. Bush recently contributed $100,000 to his nephew’s campaign, and Jeb Bush has given his son $25,000. In Texas, there are no limits on contributions for nonfederal races.

For those who have been critical of Bush for being so willing to embrace Trump when so many of his relatives were not, it’s useful to recall that those older Bushes were practical politicians willing to do whatever was necessary to win.

As president, George W. Bush pushed hard for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

But George P. Bush isn’t terribly interested in pursuing that idea. Rather, his campaign ads promote a get-tough approach to border security designed to appeal to Trump loyalists.

He similarly talks tough about crime and illegal trafficking and allies himself firmly with the law enforcement community. He supports the restrictive Texas abortion law, though he fears it might not pass constitutional muster with the Supreme Court. He is more optimistic that the high court will uphold Mississippi’s abortion law and hopes the court’s conservative majority will overturn Roe v. Wade.

On education issues, he sides with parents who feel their views are being ignored by local school boards. He said he wants schools to offer “both sides” of issues and not just one. Asked what the other side of, say, the story of slavery might be, he said he favors “a more fact-based approach to historic curriculum.” He called slavery “odious” and “destructive” but said the teaching of racial history is not a “reason for resenting people of different colors and different backgrounds” or that substitutes teachers’ opinions for historical facts.

Notably, Bush breaks with Trump on the 2020 election and says he believes President Biden was legitimately elected. Yet he still feels compelled by the forces animating his party. In the interview, Bush said voting fraud “is an important issue” that would be a focus of his time as attorney general.