It’s not unfair for Donald Trump to bring up 9/11 in his ongoing debate with Jeb Bush. Over the course of the campaign, Trump has criticized George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq — also fair game — and during the second Republican debate, on Sept. 16, Jeb Bush resorted to a “W kept us safe” defense when Trump went after his brother again.
“Your brother’s administration gave us Barack Obama,” Trump said to Jeb, “because it was such a disaster, those last three months, that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have been elected.”
“You know what?” Bush responded. “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe.”
Door opened. How can one say George W. Bush kept us safe when 9/11 happened on his watch? Trump asked recently. After all, there were well-known intelligence failures on W’s watch in the months leading up to Sept. 11. And the basic fact is that it happened during Bush’s presidency.
Jeb Bush called such talk “pathetic.” “We were attacked & my brother kept us safe,” he said via Twitter.
The fight escalated Sunday. “Jeb said, ‘We were safe with my brother. We were safe.’ Well, the World Trade Center just went down,” Trump said on Fox News Sunday. “Now, am I trying to blame him? I’m not blaming anybody, but the World Trade Center came down, so when he said we were safe, we were not safe. We lost 3,000 people. It was one of the greatest — probably the greatest catastrophe ever in this country.”
Perhaps the back-and-forth will escalate even further. But even if it doesn’t, the 9/11 flap shows the danger of dynastic candidacies. Obviously, Bush wouldn’t have to make the arguments he’s making had his brother not been president. Jeb has struggled all campaign with how (and when) to defend his brother’s troubled time in the White House.
At the same time, Hillary Clinton would never make such an argument against Jeb Bush, because the intelligence failures that occurred in the eight months of the George W. Bush administration before 9/11 were preceded by years of intelligence failures in the Bill Clinton administration.* (The 9/11 Commission report tells a long and dispiriting story.) It would help Clinton no more to defend the intelligence failures of her husband’s time in office then it does Bush to defend his brother. In a Hillary vs. Jeb race, it’s likely neither would go there.
It may well turn out that many Republican voters don’t want to hear any of it. As admirers of George W. Bush, they might hold it against Trump for bringing it up. But the peculiar circumstances of the 2016 race — the wife of a president running in one party and the brother/son of presidents running in the other — illustrate the difficulty with dynastic politics. Dynastic candidates come into a race with a lot to defend.
*Actually, Clinton did try it once, and it didn’t work out well for her. In May 2002, the New York Post ran on its front page a story with the headline “Bush Knew,” suggesting George W. Bush had advance knowledge that al Qaeda was planning some sort of airplane attack. Then-Sen. Clinton took a copy of the paper to the Senate floor and said, “We have learned that President Bush had been informed last year, before September 11, of a possible plot by those associated with Osama bin Laden to hijack a U.S. airliner.” The White House hit back hard — in addition to the many commentators who were blaming Bill Clinton for pre-9/11 failures — and Clinton stayed away from that particular line of attack after that.
