Donald Trump’s criticism of Jeb Bush’s brother over the 9/11 attacks is resonating strongly with one group:
Liberals.
They are more than happy to seize the moment and blame George W. Bush for the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history.
Take MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who is pumped up over the Trump
offensive: “The Democrats never had the stones to go out and challenge
George W… because they probably felt that would be un-nice. Trump isn’t
un-nice, he’s willing to be tough.”
Brad Woodhouse, a former Democratic Party spokesman, sent out an
email saying “Trump is right about 9/11.” That linked to a liberal piece
in the Atlantic with the same headline.
Any fair review of what happened would conclude that the Clinton and
Bush administrations shared responsibility for the attacks that claimed
the lives of 3,000 Americans. The intelligence failures over the
al-Qaeda plot, which had been in the works for years, certainly predate
Bush, who had only been in office for eight months. But it’s also true
that the classified presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001 warned
Bush: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”—and there were other
warnings as well.
In pure political terms, Trump has shifted the campaign conversation
in a way that hurts Jeb. The more time that Jeb spends talking about
2001, the less time he spends talking about the future. And the more
time he spends defending his brother, the more he reminds voters that he
is the third Bush to seek the White House—which undermines Jeb’s “I’m
my own man” theme.
This has become a Trump specialty, to jab at his rivals with a
provocative comment that forces them to spend days counterpunching.
The contretemps began with a television interview on Bloomberg, when Trump said this about the 43
rd president: “I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.”
When anchor Stephanie Ruehl objected, Trump said people could blame
Bush or not, but this was a fact: “The World Trade Center came down
during his reign.”
That prompted Jeb to tweet that the billionaire’s comments were “pathetic.”
Since the Trump line contradicts Jeb’s narrative that his brother
“kept us safe,” Bush stepped it up on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying
Trump is not serious when it comes to foreign policy: “Does anybody
actually blame my brother for the attacks on 9/11? If they do, they’re
totally marginalized in our society.”
But nobody this side of the conspiracy nuts is blaming George Bush
for the
attacks; some are saying (which was widely reported in the following
years, though little remembered now) that his administration missed
important signals and that law-enforcement and intelligence agencies
failed to share information.
Trump elaborated Monday’s on “Fox & Friends” and Tuesday on CNN’s
“New Day,” saying his tougher approach to immigration might have kept
most of the hijackers out of the country. (This is debatable, as most of
them had valid student and tourist visas.)
And the new focus on what was dubbed the War on Terror enabled Trump
to pivot to Iraq, saying on CNN it was “just a disastrous decision” for
the former president to launch that invasion and destabilize the Middle
East.
Trump also told anchor Alisyn Camerota that “they knew an attack was
coming. George Tenet, the CIA director, knew in advance there would be
an attack, and he said so.”
It sounded at first glance like Trump might be wading into murky
waters, but the key phrase is “an attack.” Tenet was indeed worried
about an al-Qaeda attack—he insisted on a meeting with Condi Rice to
press the point—but he didn’t know when and where, or that planes would
be hijacked.
While liberals are jumping on this Trump bandwagon, some
conservatives are upset. Fox’s Dana Perino, Bush’s former press
secretary, accused Trump of peddling “liberal conspiracy theories.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a major detractor, ran a
piece titled “Trump’s 9/11 Truthing.” The headline is unfair because
truthers are those who say the Bush administration was complicit in the
attacks.
“Mr. Trump is now trying to blunt that rebuke by distorting the truth about the hijackers and the
Osama bin Laden era…Blaming
George W. Bush for the 9/11 attacks is like blaming President Obama for
the recession that followed the 2008 financial panic,” the Journal
says. “The rise of al Qaeda had been going on for years, and its first
attack on U.S. soil was its bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.”
National Review,
which is hostile to The Donald, published a column yesterday in which
Jeb said Trump “echoes the attacks of Michael Moore and the fringe Left
against my brother is yet another example of his dangerous views on
national-security issues…
“Donald Trump simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And
his bluster overcompensates for a shocking lack of knowledge on the
complex national-security challenges that will confront the next
president of the United States.”
Perhaps it’s just a
coincidence, but Mike Murphy, an 18-year Jeb adviser who runs his Super
PAC, broke a long period of media silence by calling Trump “a false
zombie front-runner. He’s dead politically, he'll never be president of
the United States, ever. By definition I don't think you can be a
front-runner if you're totally un-electable,” Murphy
told Bloomberg.
So Jeb World is fully engaged. And since Bush’s interviews tend not
to generate much news, maybe this has brought him more media attention
than he’s gotten in weeks.
But he’s playing very much on Trump’s turf, and that has hurt. In the
latest CNN poll, Trump hit 27 percent, and Bush is at 8—numbers that,
however early, Jeb needs to find a way to change.