Jeb Bush is tired of being Donald Trump’s punching bag.
But more than that, the former Florida governor has concluded that the New York billionaire businessman/entertainer is more than a passing fad and isn’t going to fall from his perch as the frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination without a push. Candidates can no longer afford to ignore him, they must fight him.
So Bush is taking off the gloves, and adopting an aggressive strategy to unmask “the real Donald Trump” as a faux conservative who will say anything to get elected.
“If we can use Trump and his liberal track record as a foil to discuss Jeb’s conservative record, we’re going to do it,” Bush campaign spokesman Tim Miller said Tuesday, in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
Miller added: “If Trump is going to attempt to run a legitimate campaign, he needs to be treated as a legitimate candidate, and we’re going to treat him as such. We’re not going to duck and hide and hope he flames out; that’s not a path to success.” In fact, hoping he flames out is how many of the contenders are handling Trump. They figure the nomination fight will experience a natural course correction once voters more seriously consider who they want running the free world, absolving them of the need to take him out.
“The Trump bubble isn’t going to stay this way, you’re already seeing reporters treat him more like a candidate — just barely,” said one aide to a GOP candidate, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.
The summer Trump balloon has defied political physics. Gaffes that would drive other candidates out of the race have had no effect. Ideological flexibility on core conservative issues usually scorned by GOP primary voters has been overlooked — perhaps because on the matter of illegal immigration, Trump has no equal. He vows to forcibly round up and deport the 11-12 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. No other Republican presidential contender embraced that.
The Bush campaign declined to discuss any research or polling that might have led to its new Trump strategy, initiated late last month. But Bush and his political team appear reasonably confident that Republican voters will reassess Trump once they are educated about his past and current positions on key issues, as well as the magnitude to which he has supported top Democrats in recent years, including Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
The Bush team is delivering that education in the form of web advertisements, such as one titled “The Real Donald Trump” that was issued on Tuesday.
The spot features a montage of Trump expressing his support for, among other policies, abortion, tax hikes, President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package that passed in 2009, and Clinton’s negotiating abilities as secretary of state. The video mashup also notes Trump’s support for nationalized health care, stated just this past July. Trump claims to have evolved on most, though not all, of these matters.
Bush isn’t depending on slick ads alone to make the case.
“It’s almost like Donald Trump is acting like a Washington politician; that’s what they do,” Bush said Tuesday, during an interview on Fox News. “Our ad simply uses his own language, his own words, to say that he is, more a Democrat than a Republican, that he’s for higher taxes rather than cutting taxes, that he believes in a single-payer system, that he’s not only pro-choice, but believes in partial birth abortion. Those are his words, not mine.”
Trump, who responded on Twitter, criticized Bush’s attack as lame, although he didn’t necessarily dispute the specific charges leveled against him. “Yet another weak hit by a candidate with a failing campaign. Will Jeb sink as low in the polls as the others who have gone after me?” Trump also released an Instagram video of Bush, and his brother, President George W. Bush, saying nice things about Clinton.
Since entering the race in June, Trump has focused most of his fire on Bush, criticizing the Floridian on immigration and other policies. But the bombastic New Yorker hasn’t stopped there.
He regularly mocks Bush and his family, which produced the two most recent Republican presidents. Trump has said Bush lacks the energy to be president, and has used Twitter to ridicule him for using his first name rather than his last name in his campaign slogan. “Jeb Bush never uses his last name on advertising, signage, materials etc. Is he ashamed of the name BUSH? A pretty sad situation.”
Bush ignored Trump through most of the summer, and during that time, Trump’s poll numbers rose, and Bush’s dipped. In the latest RealClearPolitics.com average of national GOP primary polls, Trump led with 26.5 percent; Bush was in third place with 9.5 percent. That’s generally a reversal of where things stood between the two in mid June and early July, around the time Trump entered the contest.
Candidates for office who don’t respond to attacks from competitors run the risk of leaving voters with the impression that the attacks have merit. But Republican presidential candidates have seen mixed results in their efforts to call out Trump for being insufficiently conservative. It hasn’t worked out that well for former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Businesswoman Carly Fiorina, however, has only seen her poll numbers rise since she first questioned Trump’s conservative bona fides in early August.
Bush is betting that he’ll have similar results. Republican strategists unaffiliated with any of the GOP contenders urge caution, however. No candidate is served well by a strategy that wholly revolves around criticizing Trump, or cozying up to him, as some have done.
“The biggest mistake anyone can make at this stage is to implement a Trump strategy. If voters’ summer fling with a fundamentally unserious candidate is enough to change your campaign strategy then it doesn’t say much about the stability of the campaign,” a Republican political operative said. “It doesn’t mean you need to just sit there and take it from Trump. It does however mean that you don’t need to be pulled into conversations about anchor babies or waste campaign dollars on ads against the idiot.”
Disclosure: The author’s wife works as an adviser to Scott Walker.
