Jeb Bush is still #NeverTrump
Jeb Bush may have dropped out of the presidential race five months ago, but the mention of Donald Trump’s name still gets him riled up.
Bush could not conceal his frustration over Trump’s rise and his disdain for the presumptive Republican nominee during an interview Monday night with former Republican political operative Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC.
“Kudos for the guy,” Bush said bitterly. “He sensed an opening, this deep dissatisfaction, and he played it like a Stradivarius violin.”
Bush predicted that voters who support Trump will feel “betrayed” after Trump’s promises to build a wall on the border with Mexico and to ban Muslims from entering the country turn out to be empty, proposals Bush has vehemently opposed. And he said that Trump has discarded the ideas that have animated the GOP.
“Conservatism is temporarily dead,” Bush told Wallace during a wide-ranging interview at his family’s vacation compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Trump, Bush said, is “barely a Republican. He’s certainly not a conservative.”
It was the first time that the former Florida governor has talked publicly about his failed presidential campaign.
Bush said in May that he would not be voting for either Trump or presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. On Monday, he was expansive on the subject of that decision.
“I respect people going through the process and saying this is a binary decision,” he said. “I can’t do it. I cannot do it … I’ve reached my conclusion after deep thought and prayer on this.”
But as Wallace questioned Bush, he made it clear that he could understand voting for Clinton as much as he could for Trump.
“I can see why” some Republicans would vote for Clinton, he said. As for himself, he considers her foreign policy decisions in Syria and elsewhere “disastrous” and believes she would “not be a strong leader on the world stage.”
“I don’t trust Hillary Clinton,” Bush added, pointing to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement last week of the findings of his agency’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, which contradicted several of her prior statements.
Even so, Bush said he would be “sad” if Clinton wins in the fall, but if Trump wins, “I’ll be worried.”
He even signaled that he will consider voting for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld.
Bush’s interview with Wallace came almost a year to the day after Bush announced his candidacy in Miami to a few thousand adoring supporters. At the time, Bush was expected to win his party’s nomination.
But on June 16, a day after Bush’s announcement, Trump jumped into the race. Within a month, Trump had caught up with Bush in the polls, and by late July, Trump had taken the a lead, which he has held ever since except for a brief moment last November when retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson overtook him.
Bush said the media bore some responsibility for Trump’s success, saying that the business mogul’s candidacy was “partially created by the media’s coverage of him that blocked out the sun effectively for other candidates.”
Bush lamented a general sense of distrust. “People don’t believe anything anybody says anymore,” he said. But he added: “I don’t know if they even heard what I said.”
“This is the environment of reality TV. It’s us, it’s not the Kardashians,” Bush said. “The Kardashians wouldn’t exist if we didn’t enjoy watching them.”
“I’m not sure anything I would have done would have changed the outcome. There is some weird solace in that I guess,” Bush said.
