Jeb Counters Trump: ‘We Were Attacked & My Brother Kept Us Safe’ — Really
Jeb Bush is boldly playing up his best asset in an effort to come back against Donald Trump: namely, all those fond memories people have of George W. Bush.
In an interview broadcast Friday on Bloomberg Politics, Trump got asked how he would be able to be a consoling leader, like President George W. Bush after 9/11 — and his response laid into the latter man in a brutal fashion that we simply haven’t heard from any major presidential candidate in the entire 14 years since that day.
“When you talk about George Bush,” Trump said, “I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time… He was president, okay?”
An irate Jeb Bush took to Twitter that afternoon, to tear into The Donald and to defend his noble kinsman.
How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 16, 2015
There are, of course, a few problems here — most notably the sentence, “We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
And then there’s also the issue this of how then-President George W. Bush’s actually did respond to the attacks: His administration failed to apprehend Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and quickly switched its focus toward pursuing an unrelated war in Iraq. Six months after 9/11, President Bush even publicly boasted that he didn’t think much about bin Laden anymore.
Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush tours Next Step Bionics & Prosthetics in Manchester, New Hampshire October 14, 2015. REUTERS/Mary Schwalm