One person close to the funeral planning said the Bush family’s overtures to Trump were at least partly pragmatic. Trump has the final say over important funeral details, this person said, including providing Air Force One to carry the former president’s remains from Texas to Washington on Monday for the funeral and back to Texas on Thursday for another service and burial.
While Trump will not deliver a eulogy, he will be seated in the front row alongside former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Bush’s son, former president George W. Bush, will deliver a eulogy.
Neither he nor the other eulogists — former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, former senator Alan K. Simpson, and presidential historian and Bush biographer Jon Meacham — are expected to focus on the stark differences between the genteel and patrician Bush and the bombastic Trump.
“If you have a sensitivity for human feelings, you just don’t get into that,” Simpson said in an interview Monday. “It’s not what a funeral is for.”
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