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50 free George W. Bush trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
George W. Bush is the only president with an MBA, the most recent to have served in the military, and the first since 1888 to win the White House while losing the popular vote. He was head cheerleader at Andover, co-owned the Texas Rangers, quit drinking the day after his 40th birthday, and after leaving office took up oil painting because of a Winston Churchill essay. In between came the most turbulent presidency of the early twenty-first century. This George W. Bush trivia quiz runs 50 questions across his whole life: New Haven and Midland, Yale and Harvard Business School, the Texas Air National Guard, Arbusto Energy and the Rangers, the loss to Kent Hance, two terms as Texas governor, the 2000 recount and Bush v. Gore, Dick Cheney, September 11, Afghanistan and Iraq, No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, PEPFAR, Hurricane Katrina, Roberts and Alito, the 2008 crisis and TARP, the shoe-throwing incident, Decision Points, Portraits of Courage and life in Dallas. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who remember Harriet Miers. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's biography of Bush, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Fans of this quiz should also try our US presidents and Barack Obama quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01George W. Bush was which number president of the United States?
43rd
His father was the 41st, with one two-term Democrat between them.
Q 02Before the presidency, Bush served as governor of which state?
Texas
He was the first Texas governor elected to two consecutive four-year terms.
Q 03Bush was born in 1946 in which city?
New Haven, Connecticut
His father was studying at Yale at the time; the family soon moved to Texas.
Q 04Bush's paternal grandfather Prescott Bush held which office?
U.S. senator from Connecticut
Three generations of the family held federal office, making the Bushes a genuine political dynasty.
Q 05Bush's sister Robin died at the age of three in 1953 of what?
Leukemia
His four surviving siblings are Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy.
Q 06At Phillips Academy in Andover, Bush held which role in his senior year?
Head cheerleader
He was also a cheerleader at Yale, alongside playing rugby for the university's first XV.
Q 07Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in which subject?
History
He called himself an average student, with a grade average of 77 over his first three years.
Q 08Bush was president of which fraternity in his senior year at Yale?
Delta Kappa Epsilon
He was also tapped for the Skull and Bones secret society, like his father before him.
Q 09Bush is the only U.S. president to hold which degree?
An MBA
He earned it at Harvard Business School in 1975.
Q 10Which aircraft did Bush fly with the Texas Air National Guard?
Convair F-102
He flew with the 147th Reconnaissance Wing out of Ellington Field in Houston.
Q 11Bush was suspended from flying in 1972 for failing to do what?
Take a scheduled physical exam
He had moved to Alabama to work on Winton Blount's unsuccessful Senate campaign.
Q 12What was the name of the small oil exploration company Bush founded in 1977?
Arbusto Energy
Arbusto is Spanish for bush; it later became Bush Exploration and merged into Spectrum 7.
Q 13Bush was managing general partner of which Major League Baseball team?
Texas Rangers
He turned an $800,000 stake into more than $15 million when he sold in 1998, and briefly considered running for baseball commissioner.
Q 21Bush ran for president in 2000 branding himself as what kind of conservative?
Compassionate
The label was meant to signal he was more centrist than other Republicans.
Q 22Bush lost the 2000 New Hampshire primary by 19 points to which senator?
John McCain
He regained the lead in South Carolina after a primary that critics called a smear campaign.
Q 23What was Dick Cheney's job when chosen as running mate in 2000?
Head of the VP search committee
The man running the search picked himself, to the surprise of some observers.
Q 14How much did the investor group Bush assembled pay for a controlling interest in the Rangers in 1989?
$89 million
Bush himself put in $500,000 to start and often sat in the open stands with fans.
Q 15Bush lost his first political race, a 1978 congressional bid, to which Democrat?
Kent Hance
Hance painted him as out of touch with rural Texans and won 53.2 percent of the vote.
Q 16Bush defeated which incumbent Democratic governor to win Texas in 1994?
Ann Richards
He won 53.5 percent to her 45.9 percent, the same year brother Jeb narrowly lost in Florida.
Q 17Which three advisers ran Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign?
Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh and Karl Rove
Rove would go on to design the strategy for both presidential wins.
Q 18Bush won re-election as governor in 1998 with a record share of the vote of what?
68%
His approval ratings as governor ranged between 62 and 81 percent.
Q 19As governor, Bush signed a 1999 law that helped Texas become the leading U.S. producer of what?
Wind-generated electricity
The renewable portfolio standard required electric retailers to buy a share of their power from renewables.
Q 20Bush presided over how many executions as governor, more than any previous modern governor?
152
Critics such as Sister Helen Prejean argued he gave clemency requests little serious consideration.
Q 24By how many votes did the machine recount show Bush had won Florida in 2000?
537
Out of about six million ballots cast; the Supreme Court halted a statewide hand recount in Bush v. Gore.
Q 25How many electoral votes did Bush receive in the 2000 election?
271
Gore had 266 after one District of Columbia elector abstained.
Q 26Bush was the first candidate to win the presidency while losing the popular vote since whom?
Benjamin Harrison
Harrison did it in 1888; Bush trailed Gore by 543,895 votes nationwide.
Q 27Bush's landmark 2002 education law was called what?
No Child Left Behind
It passed with broad bipartisan support, including Senator Ted Kennedy's.
Q 28Three days after 9/11, Bush addressed rescue workers at Ground Zero through what?
A megaphone
"I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
Q 29In his January 2002 State of the Union, Bush labelled which three countries an "axis of evil"?
Iraq, Iran and North Korea
The phrase became the basis for the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war.
Q 30Bin Laden escaped U.S. forces in December 2001 after a battle in which mountainous region?
Tora Bora
The administration later admitted it had not committed enough ground troops; bin Laden was killed in 2011.