Some liberals have suddenly decided they like former President George W. Bush after his thinly veiled attacks against President Donald Trump.

During an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer on “The TODAY Show” Monday, Bush seemed to indirectly criticize President Trump by paying tribute to the importance of freedom of religion and a free press.

“You know things are bad when George W. Bush starts sounding like a member of the Resistance.”

“I just saw George Bush give a shout out to atheists! Oh sh*t, I’m turning into Trump, tweeting back to the tv,” tweeted a clearly excited Bill Maher.

This is the same Bill Maher who built a career on eight years of hurling over-the-top insults at Bush.

“President Bush is supporting Arnold [Schwarzenegger] but a lot of Republicans are not, because he is actually quite liberal. Karl Rove said if his father wasn’t a Nazi, he wouldn’t have any credibility with conservatives at all,” Maher said in 2003.

Former Republican turned left-leaning pundit Matthew Dowd also had words of praise for his former boss who he once eagerly bashed. “I had a very public break with President Bush in 2007, but always maintained he was a good man. His speaking out in [the] last day shows just that,” Dowd said.

When asked by LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham via Twitter if his “speaking out” might display a hypocrite with an agenda, Dowd asserted that Bush was moved to comment “Because [he] supports the first amendment.”

In addition to comments on television, the former-president also indirectly panned Trump to People Magazine. “I don’t like the racism and I don’t like the name-calling and I don’t like people feeling alienated,” he told People on Monday. “Nobody likes that.”

The sudden warming of liberal hearts when it comes to Bush hasn’t gone unnoticed. “George W. Bush: hero of the left. Strange times,” tweeted University of California, Irvine political science professor Rick Hasen.

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“You know things are bad when George W. Bush starts sounding like a member of the Resistance,” echoed George Takei of Star Trek fame.

Bush appears to have fallen for same sort of apocalyptic demonizing about Trump that was once directed at him.

The only difference is that he is no longer in office, hence the mainstream media is no longer doing everything in their power to make the American people believe that Bush is Hitler — those efforts are now reserved solely for Trump.

“Bush’s decision to invade Iraq is now held up as his biggest blunder. Yet for being on the same page with Hillary Clinton, Bush was rewarded with the Bushitler [sic] meme,” wrote Kyle Smith in the New York Post. “It wasn’t just random protesters who made the fascist comparisons: Keith Olbermann, Naomi Wolf and Chris Matthews all invoked Hitler and or/fascism in discussing Bush,” Smith continued.