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Early this year, I lamented that the nation’s former presidents had not come forward, forcefully and ideally as one bipartisan unit, to condemn the utterly condemnable incumbent.

At the time I wrote, armed and masked federal agents that President Trump had sent into American cities to enforce his immigrant deportations had recently killed two citizens and were roughing up and violating the civil rights of countless legal and undocumented residents alike. At military bases, Trump goaded young service members, who are bound by a code of nonpartisanship, to boo past Democratic presidents and to vote Republican. He’d posted a caricature online of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. And those were just the highlights in that moment of Trump’s presidency of lowlights.

I asked then: “Where are the statesmen when the state is under siege by the current head of state?”

Finally, belatedly, as Americans have begun voting in midterm elections that are a referendum on Trump, a couple of them — Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — have stepped up. Especially Obama, easily the most popular of the ex-presidents. The two men have set aside the traditional deference within the presidential fraternity, a norm (ignored, like others, by Trump) that dates to George Washington. As well they should: From Washington on, Americans have never seen a president as corrupt, incompetent and contemptuous of the Constitution as Trump.

Obama’s and Clinton’s separate stumping on the campaign trail is not the united front of ex-presidents that I’d hoped for. Joe Biden suffers from metastatic cancer, and many Democratic candidates wouldn’t welcome him anyway. And George W. Bush has retired from presidential politics, his office said in 2024. Both Bush’s daughter Barbara and brother Neil have made known that they’re supporting Democrat James Talarico for Texas senator over Republican and Trump vassal Ken Paxton.

Neil Bush, in his statement, went beyond Paxton to........

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