George W. Bush

Nothing on this page was performed. Bush was the 43rd president of the United States, in office from 2001 to 2009, and governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000; he is the eldest son of the 41st president. The filmography exists because documentary makers had eight years of televised material to work with, and kept working with it.

Almost every credit here is archive footage, which makes the page a record of how his presidency has been used inside other people's arguments. Michael Moore built three films partly out of it, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Fahrenheit 11/9. Climate documentaries used him in An Inconvenient Truth and its sequel. So did films about health care (Sicko), incarceration (13th), cyberweapons (Zero Days), economic inequality (Inequality for All) and the arms trade (Shadow World). Adam Curtis folded him into HyperNormalisation.

A smaller group of credits are direct participation rather than found footage. He sat for interviews in 9/11: Inside the President's War Room (2021), reads from the founding documents in The Words That Built America (2017), appears at the Beijing 2008 opening ceremony and turns up in a David Blaine special. The distance between those two categories is the interesting thing here: one set shows a man presenting himself, the other shows what editors did with him afterwards, and the same footage often serves both.