I kind of wanted to claw my eyeballs out after reading Ann Althouse’s take on Donald Trump’s emasculation of Jeb Bush. She is one strange lady. But I will say this: it’s never good when a male politician is made to look weak, and it’s particularly devastating when the office they seek is the presidency of the United States of America.
Donald Trump may mince around like a showgirl in Ms. Althouse’s imagination, but he’s got a left hook like Joe Frazier and he’s knocked Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, and Jeb Bush flat on their asses.
Now, for starters, Jeb Bush is supposed to be a colossus. With the amount of money he raised and his family’s deep connections in the Media Establishment and throughout the Republican Party all the way down to the precinct level, Jeb Bush is supposed to be intimidating. If you cross this family, you should expect to pay a heavy price. From Grandma Barbara on down, this group doesn’t even let the dish grow cold before they start exacting revenge. As for Dubya, he cut his teeth as the Sonny Corleone of the family, cutting people off, delivering the death stares, calling people on the carpet and even taking care of the most unpleasant firings. If Poppy was genteel and civilized, his boy-consigliere was a head-cracker. And when it came time for Dubya to become a politician in his own right, he brought on guys like Karl Rove and eventually Dick Cheney to show you how a ratfucking is properly applied.
You could run against them, and maybe even beat them, and you could cover them on your political beat, but you needed to show some respect or you’d know about it.
What Donald Trump has done is just waltz right in and show this family, and their second-rate Prince Harry, whatever is less than zero respect.
In a 35-minute interview this week with The Washington Post tracing his history with the Bushes, Trump unleashed a hailstorm of scorn. He found 33 ways to skewer the family — about one put-down per minute.
On Jeb Bush: “I mean, this guy. I don’t think he has a clue.”
On George H.W. Bush: “I really liked the father — really like him as a person. But I hated his ‘read my lips, no more taxes,’ and then he raised taxes monstrously.”
On George W. Bush: “He didn’t seem smart. I’d watch him in interviews and I’d look at people and ask, ‘Do you think he understands the question?’ ”
And back to Jeb: “He’s not up to snuff. . . . Jeb is never going to bring us to the promised land. He can’t.”
When he was conversing with the Washington Post editorial board and insulting the Bush family at a rate of approximately one dig per minute he went beyond vague broadsides and got quite personal. For example, here’s what he said about Jeb Bush taking a job with Lehman Brothers.
“This is huge. Let me ask you: Why would you pay a man $1.3 million a year for a no-show job at Lehman Brothers — which, when it failed, almost took the world with it?”
For whatever reason, Trump is just dripping with contempt for the Bushes, and has a particular dislike of Jeb.
But as they tapped putts on the manicured greens, something else was on Trump’s mind: Jeb Bush.
“He was trashing Jeb and, quite honestly, I don’t think he’s ever held Jeb in high regard,” said [Speaker of the Florida House] Steve Crisafulli, a Bush supporter who said he was “uncomfortable” with the conversation and defended the former Florida governor to Trump. “I’ve met with Mr. Trump on several occasions, and he’s constantly had things to say about Jeb. . . . He’s always had a negative connotation about Jeb.”
I guess it helps to be a billionaire if you want to go around trying to drum up business in Florida while absolutely trashing Jeb Bush at every opportunity. Mere mortals would never consider such effrontery, and they’d surely learn their lesson in short order.
There’s no doubt that Trump is a bully. But this is a case of a bully standing up to a bully and exposing the latter as a paper tiger. And this is really what GOP strategist Steve Schmidt was getting at when he said the following:
“Look, Jeb Bush was a very successful governor, he’s a thoughtful man, he was a good, conservative governor. But every day, Donald Trump is emasculating Jeb Bush, and Republican primary voters are not going to default to the establishment candidate who is being weakened by these attacks that go unresponded to.”
I don’t know how Jeb Bush thinks he is responding, but none of it is getting through. I hear nothing, and it’s basically like Trump has Jeb by the hair and is just dunking him repeatedly under the water while taunting him for being a weak and ineffectual and “low energy” loser.
When you’re getting abused like that, every effort to fight back just results in big gulps of chlorine.
Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump reacts as he speaks at the 2015 FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Nevada July 11, 2015. REUTERS/L.E. Baskow/Las Vegas Sun
And the results are in. Poll after poll after poll show that Jeb is increasingly an afterthought among Republican voters. I mean, Ed Kilgore did a good job of explaining this yesterday afternoon after he took a look at the highly esteemed Ann Selzer Iowa Poll:
According to this poll, Hillary Clinton is the favorite of 37% of likely Iowa Caucus-goers (45% if Joe Biden’s not included, as he should not be since he’s given zero public indication that he’s running). Jeb Bush is the favorite of 6% of likely Republican Caucus-goers.
Hillary Clinton’s favorability/unfavorability ratio among Iowa Democrats is 77/19 (pretty much the same as that of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden). Bush’s ratio is 45/50, trailing twelve GOP candidates in this basic measure of popularity. 13% of Democrats say they’d never vote for HRC. 39% of Republicans say they’d never vote for Bush.
In FiveThirtyEight’s point system for endorsements by statewide elected officials, Jeb Bush has 34 points. Hillary Clinton has 320.
But it’s not just Iowa. Bush can’t crack ten percent in New Hampshire or South Carolina or even in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls.
When Eric Cantor came out and endorsed Jeb, Trump mocked Cantor and called him a loser. When key members of Jeb’s finance team resigned this week, Trump reveled in the unseemliness of it all and said they were fleeing a sinking ship. Trump even used Jeb’s own mother in an advertisement against him.
This all might seem like playground stuff, but Jeb doesn’t compensate by going out and clearing brush on his ranch. He doesn’t even obsessively work out or go bicycling every damn where. He’s soft and doughy and low energy and non-threatening, and he just looks like a guy who wants to run the Pentagon but has been stripped of every last shred of toughness and masculinity.
It’s true that nine out of every ten things that Trump says are either untrue or insane, but when he goes after the Bush family what he says is generally accurate.
Now, as the National Review reminded us earlier this summer, back when Jeb was giving us the Hamlet routine about whether or not he’d actually run for president, he told everyone that he didn’t want to get into a nasty campaign:
Bush has been paying lip service to the politics of joy ever since his first flirtations with a presidential run last year. “The decision will be based on, can I do it joyfully?” he said in January 2014. “I think we need to have candidates lift our spirits. It’s a pretty pessimistic country right now.” In April 2014, he promised to push a “hopeful, optimistic message” and to avoid “the vortex of the mudfight.” In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last November, he talked about the “joy in [his] heart.”
Obviously, he thought he could get away with that kind of campaign or he would have taken a pass on the whole endeavor. Some people say that this shows that he doesn’t have the fire in the belly, and others say that it demonstrates his deep sense of entitlement. But what it really looks like is a guy who just isn’t ready for a fight.
And if I know anything about the Conservative Movement and the Republican base, it’s that they want to fight and they want a fighter to lead them. Jeb’s not that guy and he’s just never going to be that guy.
So, then, we must really start to contemplate who is going to be their nominee. Because someone has to stand up to Trump, and sure as shit isn’t going to be this guy:
But, of course, we’ve seen Republican frontrunners come back from the brink of political death before. From the beginning, Jeb’s best argument for himself has been that the alternatives are unthinkable.
It’s just getting pretty hard to see the path that takes him to frontrunner status again. Jeb has been exposed and there just doesn’t seem to be anything in his skill set or temperament that will get him back on track.
In any case, there’s not much about Republican politics that is thinkable these days anyway.
Prepare for weirdness and be ready to fight.
I had a couple of responses.
I’m starting to think Jeb is damaged goods already; his weakness a meme for lazy journalists. Politico and others have been chumming the water; what’s up with that?
He was always damaged goods. His favorables among Republicans were weak from the very beginning.
hey, if you are into masturbating fetuses, she’s the blogger for you.
I kind of agree. Trump is not hurting Jeb as much as Jeb’s handling of Trump is hurting Jeb.
I didn’t ever think Jeb had the horses. I thought it was going to be another Mittens campaign, with Jeb possibly winning in the end because everyone else was just too clownish for words, and the real alternatives (Walker and Kasich) wouldn’t want to get between the Bushies and the world.
What Trump did, was make it possible for Kasich/Walker to jump in. His handling of Jeb has taken the heat off anyone who could possibly appeal to the Bush coterie. Fortunately, Kasich is sane in at least one aspect (Gay Marriage) and Walker is beyond batshit in the other (immigration) and thus, BOTH of them have apparently taken themselves out of the running. Until they get back in, of course.
From the Rucker/Costa piece:
Let’s just savour that for a moment.
$1.3 million isn’t so much (and Trump knows that) for a no-show job. Similar to what Chelsea Clinton took in at MSNBC for a show up a few times job.
Then I suppose Hillary can expect more of the same if Trump is nominated.
I am surprised by the fact that this post has made me feel grateful for Trump’s presence in our political world.
I share his contempt for the Bush family, but am aware that they are well-practiced at stealing the presidency. There’s a reason why people are reluctant to stand in the way of a Bush.
And if they get the office, watch out. Don’t count Jeb out yet. Back in 1988, his father was portrayed as a wimp in his presidential campaign and he won. And he was a wimp, sort of. At the time, I cut Reagan some slack because he was an ignorant puppet, but I always figured Poppy Bush was smart enough to know better. He was and did, but he was a corrupt, spineless Republican all the same. Between him and the first son he foisted on us, the U.S. has been brought to its knees.
Poppy Bush was the Director of the CIA. The CIA named their new headquarters after him. He was not a wimp and he didn’t shy away from fights or playing on the dirtiest imaginable level.
It’s true he got tagged with that line by Time Magazine, but Time payed a price for that and he got to be president anyway.
They don’t call them the Bush Crime Family because of the sons.
That was one of his sinecures and he held the job for merely one year. If the ranks of the CIA fell in love with the guy in such a short period of time, it’s because he didn’t do anything and they were able to run rings around him.
He may not be as dull as his sons, but he’s no rocket scientist. Ann Richards nailed it — born on third and thought he hit a triple.
you need to familiarize yourself with the context of Poppy’s tenure as DCI.
As Director or as VP?
Recall: Church Committee investigation 1975 and final report issued April 1976.
GHWB – DCIA – January 1976-January 1977. The frontman to reassure those at the CIA that Congress would not dismantle intelligence services. That work was done by Rummy and other Ford WH “intelligence” employees.
A new, outside hire CEO of a large organization doesn’t accomplish much if replaced after one year.
Booman’s right. It doesn’t really matter how long he was head of the CIA, what’s important is that he was CIA. He was the only president we’ve ever had who was fully and wholeheartedly a “company” man.
Poppy Bush didn’t get introduced to the CIA when he became the director.
Look, I’m not going to get into this right now, but by the time he became director he’d been running with the Bay of Pigs folks for over a decade, some of whom were lifelong friends. The whole Iran-Contra thing was hatched by Bush folk who knew him from before his stint as director.
For all I know, Prescott introduced him into that world, but he was part of it down in Houston and it carried forward all the way through to the election of his son.
Well aware of all of that (or as much as some have managed to sketchily put together), but doubt that he ever actually ran anything. Others, both inside and outside the company, were the bigger brains who ran operations and probably Bush as well.
Google “zapata oil” and hang on to your hat.
No need. Already read Russ Baker’s and Kevin Phillips books on the Bush crime family. Doubt we’ll see better documented stuff in my lifetime and by then, it’ll be of as much public interest as Harding’s “love child.”
Family of Secrets looks really good; thanks for the tip!
It’s long. Too many leaps in connecting dots for my taste. Although still appreciate Baker’s works. Recall that Phillip’s book was on firmer ground.
Nah, Poppy was never a wimp. He was a wuss. Willing to give up his balls to Reagan. But he definitely had a pair of brass ones.
He was considered a good enough baseball player to consider the big leagues as a possibility.
He was also a real pilot.
No wonder W (AKA Oedipus Tex) hated him.
Tru Dat.
There are (possibly apocryphal) stories of attempted fisticuffs
The Reagan-Bush thing was much more complicated than that, and the full story probably won’t leak out until long after everyone involved is dead. However, there were two powerful factions – the Heritage-led newcomers with Reagan as their puppet and Bush leading a more traditional oil-military faction. After a tough primary season Bush’s folks threatened to take Reagan down if he didn’t make Bush the VP. Reagan personally fought hard against the idea but his sponsors told him he had to. He hated the whole Bush family.
There had been an attempt by the Heritage folks to avoid Bush and instead bring in Gerald Ford as VP – Ford had sufficient connections to appease the Bush backers, but Ford apparently demanded a co-Presidency so they dropped that idea.
It’s unclear who was behind the sabotaging of the helicopters, but that might have been the price Bush’s team paid to get him on the ticket. Later Bush contributed by using his deep diplomatic/military connections to get Iran to keep the hostages until inauguration day.
So, the two were apparently set to co-exist peacefully under a Reagan administration. Until Reagan was nearly assassinated by the son of a very close friend and business associate of Bush. You can call that a conspiracy theory, but that is how close Hinkley was to Bush (google it), and the Reagan family put Bush on a shit list from that point forward.
Bush did enough to try to make it up to Reagan when given the opportunity to during the second term, and eventually Reagan was won over by his handlers enough to agree to give a speech on Bush’s behalf at the 1992 convention.
ummmmmm….not doubting your knowledge at all … but … references?
If Bush does manage to get the Republican nomination, this internecine war between Trump and Bush will harm him in the general. Like you said, the Republican base wants a fight and Jeb! is not the guy to deliver it.
Trump isn’t the only one that has no respect for Jeb(?), but others tend to loathe the whole family. Kevin Phillips was one of the few that went public with his disdain for the whole clan.
Iowa has long been considered good for the Bush family. GH did beat Reagan there in 1980 and GWB had an easy win in 2000. But GWB was running against McCain who Iowan Republicans liked even less. It also omits the 1988 results — Bush came in third far behind Dole and Robertson. Jeb(?) is being squeezed out the Iowa voting sectors that Poppy and bro managed to claim. Not seeing a path forward for him in Iowa to manage a respectable third place finish.
As for Dubya, he cut his teeth as the Sonny Corleone of the family, …
And what happened to Sonny? No, I don’t think Dubya was Sonny. He wasn’t Michael either though.
I’m pretty sure he was Sonny. Remember, Poppy never wound up in the hospital and unable to protect Dubya.
If Trump’s hatred for Jeb Bush (and pretty much the whole Bush family operation at this point) was the only thing about him, you’d have to love the guy. But it isn’t, and you don’t.
Besides, Trump’s role in this is not as great as it might seem. He nerely dramatizes the fact that MOST Americans, except for establishment Republicans, have totally had it with the Bushes. Jeb is an easy target for emasculation, and Trump is just the guy to do it. But Trump or no Trump, Jeb’s campaign was doomed from the start, because the Bushes have long since outworn their welcome with the American people. Their day is done, even if that simple fact has somehow eluded them.
If the establishment still controlled the GOP, Jeb might have been able to win the nomination, in the same way that Romney did. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. Even if it does, Bush hasn’t a chance in hell of winning the election. And if Trump were to go independent, I believe that would be the end of the GOP.
I’m starting to think that the nominee might be Ted Cruz, on the logic that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.
The GOP base seems determined to nominate an extreme right-winger. Trump and Carson are currently first and second in the polls. But in the end, they are just not viable candidates – neither of them have ever held elective office. (Same goes for Fiorina.) Cruz at least has been a senator.
If it does happen, I am going to claim the mantle of extremely brilliant prognosticator, because this is the prediction I made immediately after the 2014 election.
Trump really isn’t a genius or some kind of bullying judo master. He just figured out or stumbled into one of Serious America’s most closely yet subconsciously-held secrets: when it comes to lower-class conservatives, it’s all about race. As long as Trump continues to make it about race and no one else wants to pick up the ball, none of the Bush family’s counterattacks are going to be effective short of pictures of him fucking a male prostitute.
Eventually Serious America is going to have to come to terms with the fact a good portion of America is so neurotic and mean-spirited that they’re willing to set the nation and all of its customs on fire just to avoid the indignity of listening to two Hispanics speaking (quelle horror) Spanish in public. The way things are going, they’ll come to grips with this in 2020 after the Republican Party gets such a shellacking that the Democratic Party captures the House and ends up with 56 seats in the Senate even with a flawed candidate like Clinton or Sanders. And I mean by 2020 — they’re still going to be in denial in 2019 up until the base nominates Trump 2.0 despite getting utterly crushed last go round.
Why? Because race is really that strong of a factor with these people.
I agree. This is why I’m convinced Trump will never be elected. At the very least, it’s a factor that you have to consider if you want to project his chances.
We all know how this works. If you want to forecast a presidential election you have to break it down by state, and as always it comes down to the swing states. In Florida, for instance, if Trump is the Republican nominee, it makes a big difference that non-hispanic white people make up 56.4% of the population. Given the large black and hispanic populations, he would need a gigantic majority among that 56.4% to carry the state.
If it’s a secret, it’s very much an open secret. The Southern Strategy is well known. Trump has thrown away the dogwhistle, that’s all. The possibility of it was always there. If Trump hadn’t done it, I figure someone else would have done it eventually. The GOP establishment, when it was stronger and controlled all the money, could suppress such a candidate. No longer.
Heh. I’m reminded this am of Thom Hartmann’s theory about Trump: that he’s been hired by the Kochs to take out jeb? in order to clear the path for their preferred Kasich or Bruce Walker.
That would at least explain why Donald continues to focus his scorn on the jebster? while delivering only occasional glancing blows to others. In this theory, Trump is only there to cause specific damage; he isn’t expecting to win.
Hartmann thinks a Kasich/Rubio ticket the most likely, then Walker/?.
I agree w Thom about 93% of the time (primarily excepting his awful, ridiculous co-authored books on Dallas) and his book The Crash of 2016 might turn out to be on the mark (giving him the possibility of a Crash of 2015). Makes as much sense of the Trump phenomenon as anything else I’ve heard.
The optics on Walker are terrible. No, not the “appears to be” optics … the damn PICTURES. He looks like the guy a matchmaking grandmother would bring home for her unmarried Dr. daughter.
Kasich at the current time is in the dog house because he seems to think the Supreme Court actually is the final word on the constitution. Silly man.
I was reminded of Bruce’s terrible optics the other night when watching another episode of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week (“Shweek” as they call it). So far all he’s doing in this campaign is biting down on the hard metal cage, chipping and losing teeth, or whiffing by getting only a bite of a surfboard.
Unlike Bruce and jeb?, Kasich hasn’t been majorly damaged so far, by others or by himself, and is on the uptick. He has smarts, and still has enough in his conservative/hard right quiver to possibly be credible with their RW mob despite one or two unhelpful humane instincts. He’s also got the more attractive energy level/strong personality to appeal to enough raw meat eaters to stay viable for a good while.
He does need to slightly up his game for this next debate at the Raven Library.
How clueless do you have to be to think the Republican base is looking for a “hopeful, optimistic message”?
Or you could say that Trump is offering what passes for a hopeful, optimistic message among these barbarians: We’re going to round them up and kick them out! We’re taking our country back! Hail Trump!
I think the most straightforward explanation of Trump’s constant attacks on Jeb! is that he was clearly perceived as the most qualified, well -funded, establishment-backed candidate and thus is the candidate to beat. So Trump is trashing him 24/7. He has to if he is to win. Of course, Trump may (for whatever reasons) also dislike the Bush family, but who knows or cares? Like Carthage, Jeb! must be destroyed.
Trump is playing to win. I don’t think his run is a stunt or joke or media attention ploy. It’s been obvious for some time that the candidate of the Repub establishment ultimately gets crammed down the throat of the unruly base, and then they gamely go out and vote for McRube or Rmoney or….Jeb! Trump has to try to upend that dynamic and utterly smash Jeb before he has concentrated his traditional forces. In American politics, that means he must be personally destroyed. Hence the emasculation of the “low energy loser”. Too weak to be prez, a classic formulation, usually used to destroy the Dem.
And whatever intimidation the Bush Crime Family used to exude, it seems to have fallen to a pretty low level, given that upwards of 20 clowns have happily opted to cram into the clown car with the last Bush scion, Jeb!! The rest of the clowns will be happy to let Trump do the dirty work for them, as they try to figure out how to engineer a fall in the polls for Der Trumper.
If Jeb is pining for “joy” and “optimism” in politics then HE is the one who isn’t a Real Repub, haha. Trump is daily vomiting out bile, rage, fear, anger, hate, spite and cutting-off-one’s-nose-to-spite-one’s-face. Now THAT’S Conservatism! And if Jebby doesn’t know that, then Trump is right–Jeb! really doesn’t have a clue….
Trump may have initially got in not expecting to win, but now … likely he wants this riding atop the polls to continue as long as possible. And the fact he’s gotten rid of the too-toxic-even-for-Trump Roger Stone and put together apparently a solid ground game team in IA works somewhat against the Hartmann theory.
As for the BCF, a clue they didn’t have clear plans for their jeb? was a few years ago when matriarch Bar said America has seen enough of Bushes in the WH. The polls seem so far to bear that out. And if they don’t and he sneaks back into the race and steals the nom, then I look forward to Donald’s third-party candidacy to deny him the presidency.
Does Trump ever not play to win? That’s why I thought all the speculation that he was going to go third party seemed silly. He’s not looking to destroy the party but control it. Also demonstrate that in a crowded field of anti-abortionists and religious freaks, a thrice married, wealthy man could win.
If Poppy is Don C, and Dubya is Sonny, I guess this makes JEB! Fredo.
He might want to avoid going fishing for a while…