Joe Biden’s campaign looked into whether Bush would consider endorsing him but was told he wouldn’t be getting involved. If Biden wins and Trump refuses to concede, though, the Democrat would likely lean on Bush to speak up, a person familiar with the campaign’s thinking told me. I asked the Trump campaign if the president would want Bush’s endorsement. My email was ignored…

He sees himself as retired—so committed to staying out of politics that he declined to make a cameo in the nonpartisan celebrity voting special that ran on ABC last month. “He’s a man of good manners and strong upbringing,” Marc Racicot, the former governor of Montana, who is an old Bush friend and his first Republican National Committee chair, told me. He posited that Bush’s reluctance to speak out is because “he does not want to make things worse.” Racicot, who, like Bush, didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, decided after watching the first debate that he would be voting for Biden this year.

Bill Kristol, long an unofficial leader of the Never Trump Republicans and now part of the pro-Biden Lincoln Project, told me he finds Bush’s silence “pretty inexplicable,” given the existential moment the country is facing.

“If not now, when?” Kristol said. “If you’re not going to blow the whistle now and say, ‘This is beyond the pale,’ when are you going to do it?”