Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is getting hit from both the right and left in the press after he attacked his rival Jeb Bush by suggesting that his brother didn’t do enough to prevent the 9/11 terror attacks.
Over the weekend, Trump responded to Jeb, who has defended former president George W. Bush as having “kept us safe” after 9/11. “When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump said Friday.
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He reiterated some variation of that in the following days. Trump also said he believed that had he been president at the time, his immigration policies would have prevented the attack.
On Twitter, Jeb defended his brother. “How pathetic for Donald Trump to criticize the president for 9/11,” he wrote. “We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.” Several in the media have taken Jeb’s side.
“It is grotesquely wrong to suggest that George W. Bush is in any way to blame for the 9/11 attacks,” wrote liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. “That odious distinction belongs to Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the 19 evil young men, most of them Saudi nationals, who hijacked airplanes, turned them into missiles and killed 3,000 Americans.”
The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has criticized Trump before, also took exception. “Donald Trump is running for the Republican presidential nomination, but sometimes it’s hard to tell,” the Journal said Monday. “On national security the businessman often sounds closer to [Democratic presidential candidate] Bernie Sanders than he does to the GOP policy of active global leadership that has prevailed since the 1950s. … He ought to know more about the threats than MSNBC clichés.”
A New York Times story on Tuesday said the attacks from Trump “may backfire,” citing President Bush’s lasting popularity among Republican voters. The article noted, however, that a recent poll showed that among Republican voters Trump is favored over Jeb on foreign policy matters.
Leon Wolf, an editor of the RedState blog popular among grassroots conservatives, accused Trump of gratuitously attacking Jeb “from the left” on the 9/11 issue.
“If the people supporting Trump had any interest at all in supporting a candidate who would advance the conservative movement, they would be fleeing the Trump ship like rats after these comments,” Wolf wrote Tuesday. “If they were interested in someone who ‘fights’ for conservative principles, they would eschew someone who fights with leftist tactics just because it amuses him personally.”
Trump, never one to back down from a controversy, hit Jeb again.
“Jeb is fighting to defend a catastrophic event,” Trump tweeted Monday. “I am fighting to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Jeb is too soft — we need tougher & sharper.”
Jeb is fighting to defend a catastrophic event. I am fighting to make sure it doesn’t happen again.Jeb is too soft-we need tougher & sharper
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 19, 2015
