A former top aide has called on George W Bush to endorse Kamala Harris, becoming the latest of his circle to up the pressure on the ex-president to make a public stand and join a long list of Republicans now backing the Democratic candidate.

Nicolle Wallace, who served as the communications director in the Bush White House, called on the former president to have a “change of heart” and take a position against Donald Trump.

Wallace told MSNBC that Trump’s threatening language about Harris-supporting Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney – the daughter of Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney – had informed her appeal.

“These are the comments we’re talking about right now in the United States of America from someone running to hold the job he had,” Wallace told the outlet.

Trump last week suggested that Cheney would not be a “radical war hawk” if she was on a battlefield “with nine barrels shooting at her” and had guns “trained on her face”.

Democrats claimed Trump’s words amounted to a personal threat. The Harris campaign denounced Trump’s words as “violent rhetoric”. “This is how dictators destroy free nations,” the former Wyoming congresswoman responded.

The Trump campaign rejected the criticism, calling Cheney a warmonger and that they were making a point abut her hawkish foreign policy views.

But Bush has indicated he does not plan to take a position on the election, despite other members of his circle choosing to back Harris. Cheney’s father has come out for Harris. “In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney said in a statement. “He can never be trusted with power again.”

Bush’s daughter Barbara Pierce Bush has also said she was backing Harris and, according to the Harris campaign, has been stumping for the Democrat in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, a must-win area north of Philadelphia.

Wallace said she still hoped that the former president could be prevailed upon. “We have a right to hope that those who have stood for freedom and celebrated those who have protected it might have a last-minute change of heart in the closing hours of this campaign.”

Bush spokesperson Freddy Ford told the New York Times last month that the Republican two-term president “retired from presidential politics many years ago”.

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Bush – whose two terms as president in the 2000s saw the US invade Afghanistan and Iraq, triggering wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and lasted for years – has largely avoided the public spotlight since he left office.

He attended Trump’s inauguration in 2017, sitting near Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as Barack and Michelle Obama. According to a report by New York magazine, three people at the event said they heard Bush say “That was some weird shit” after the ceremony concluded and Trump’s time in office officially began.

This article was amended on 5 November 2024. Instead of saying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost “millions” of lives, it now says they cost “hundreds of thousands” of lives.