Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush may be “low energy,” but Donald Trump is “dead” politically, according to one longtime Bush ally.
Mike Murphy, leader of the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise USA, suggested during an interview with Bloomberg Politics Tuesday that Trump is a political placebo with zero shot of making it to the White House.
“He’s dead politically,” Murphy said. “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 unelectable. I think there’s an a priori logic problem in that,” the veteran political consultant added, calling Trump a “zombie” front-runner.
Despite Trump’s rapid ascension to the top of the Republican field — a position he’s now maintained for three consecutive months — Murphy thinks the billionaire businessman has been dead since joining the 2016 race.
“There’s no meaningful outcome to it,” he said of Trump’s candidacy. “The question is, what kind of catalyst is it? It’s a huge amount of noise and so we’re trying to find the signal in all this.”
As far as the future goes, Trump’s self-described “unpredictability” appears to be leaving even Murphy without answers.
“You’ve seen Trump start to drop now. I think it’ll be a very slow drop, but I think he’ll continue to drop and the question is: is he ready to lose primaries, will he stay in?” Murphy told Bloomberg.
He added, “Nobody knows the answer to that.”
