Nothing about the latest spat between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush will reassure those worried about Bush’s competence on the campaign trail. Photograph by Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg via Getty

In the past few days, one thing we’ve been reminded of, as Donald Trump and Jeb Bush have sniped at each other about whether George W. Bush “kept us safe," is that the two men represent two different schoolyard types. Trump is the sort of bully who relies on a freewheeling instinct for the weaknesses of others—in this case, an opponent who is reduced to befuddled outrage whenever he is called on to speak publicly about his brother. Trump's aim can be scattershot, but he can hurt. Jeb Bush is a more refined bully, who simply expects everyone to share his amazement that a person who doesn’t fit in would dare show up for a party or for a debate—the sort whose go-to insult is "weirdo." "Does anybody actually blame my brother for the attacks on 9/11? If they do, they're totally marginalized in our society,” Bush told Jake Tapper, on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Margins are not an area that Bush navigates comfortably. He repeatedly gives the unfortunate impression that he has never really listened to people who do not share his set of beliefs, and that he’s confused about why they are taken seriously. That doesn’t help when there are already concerns that the Presidency is caught in a closed dynastic loop. Indeed, nothing about this fight will reassure those who worry about Bush’s competence as a campaigner. Because another thing that Trump has illustrated is that Jeb Bush is an easy mark, and that he doesn't even know why.

Bush, after all, started it. In the September 16th Republican Presidential debate, he jumbled an answer about who his national-security advisers might be. The people he’d mentioned were mostly associated with his brother’s Administration, or his father’s, and Trump talked about the errors of the war in Iraq, as Rand Paul tried to jump in.

TRUMP: Your brother's Administration gave us Barack Obama, because it was such a disaster, those last three months, that Abraham Lincoln couldn't have been elected.

BUSH: You know what? As it relates to my brother, there's one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe.

Trump responded, “I don't know. You feel safe right now? I don't feel so safe.” But he doesn’t seem to have felt that the way he cut Bush down was adequate to the task. Last week, interviewing Trump for Bloomberg Television, Stephanie Ruhle set him off by asking how, in reassuring the public after a catastrophe, he might emulate George W. Bush’s appearances after September 11th, or Obama’s after Sandy Hook. “I need to know that you will make us feel safe, and make us feel proud,” she said. Trump replied, "I think I have a bigger heart than all of them. I think I'm much more competent than all of them. When you talk about George Bush—I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time."

"Hold on, you can't blame George Bush for that,” Ruhle said. Sure, he could. As Trump explained, "He was President, O.K.? Blame him or don't blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.” He didn’t seem to be using the word “reign” ironically. Afterward, Trump suggested that, by waiting a couple of weeks after the debate to make that statement, he had exercised almost heroic restraint. “I just didn’t want to embarrass him,” he said on Saturday, according to the Washington Post. On Sunday, he repeated the charge in an interview with Chris Wallace, on Fox News. And, on Monday, on "Fox and Friends," Trump said, "If you look at it, Jeb, during the debate, said, 'My brother kept us safe,' and I said to myself I didn’t want to embarrass him that night, but I said to myself, well, wait a minute. He kept us safe?”

Because this is Donald Trump, and not a careful historian of the September 11th attacks, he began throwing in ways that he would have stopped Al Qaeda. Some were non sequiturs (stricter immigration controls—although almost all of the terrorists had valid student, tourist, or business visas); others were a bit alarming (on “Fox and Friends”: under a President Trump, "we'd have a massive whistle-blower system,” by which he seems to have meant a mass informant system). But he also alluded to the failure of American intelligence agencies to share intelligence. As Lawrence Wright has written for The New Yorker, in a reproach to those who argue that 9/11 showed the need to remove limits on the N.S.A., the F.B.I. had a warrant in hand that could have helped stop the attack, if it hadn’t been bureaucratically thwarted. "There was no need for a metadata-collection program," Wright concludes. In The Atlantic, Peter Beinart provides a catalogue of signals and warnings that the Bush Administration failed to act on, partly owing to its focus on Iraq, and points out that, although it’s impossible to know whether heeding those warnings would have stopped the attacks, raising that possibility hardly puts a person in the realm of the “truthers”—as Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s press secretary, said of Trump. Jeb Bush responded by saying that even opening the subject is “pathetic.” Anyway, he told Tapper, he was really talking about how "my brother responded to a crisis”: after the attacks, “he united the country, he organized our country, and he kept us safe.”

And that is where Jeb Bush most gets lost. He is setting Trump—and not just Trump—up for the obvious reply: maybe no terrorist group followed up with anything like the September 11th attacks, but George W. Bush launched an invasion of Iraq that crumbled into civil war, destabilized the region, led to the neglect of Afghanistan, and laid the foundation for ISIS. By keeping “us” safe, does Jeb Bush also mean the more than four thousand Americans who died in Iraq, the more than three thousand who died in Afghanistan, and the many thousands more who were wounded? It’s a good guess that “us” does not encompass the Iraqis who died; their estimated number ranges from a hundred thousand to more than half a million. Perhaps by “safe,” Bush only means “complacent."

Bush's campaign also released an Internet video that mocks Trump for being unserious. This is not a tough task. And yet the video feels off-key: the music out of step with shots that show Trump making faces—like some weirdo. The paralysis of Bush and the Republican establishment is such that they can hardly articulate the case that Trump is silly, let alone the more important one that he is extreme. And that should be even easier. On "Fox and Friends,” Trump also mulled getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency: “We’ll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses.” Whether he meant “a little bit” of the environment or of regulation wasn’t clear. Against this, Bush has only a barrage of awkwardness. He told Tapper, "Look, the process part of this is not my motivation to run.” The process part still has a way to go, including a debate next week, on CNBC. When Tapper asked Bush about Trump’s successful drive to get CNBC to limit the debate to two hours, he said, "I can do three, I can do two. Whatever they decided, I'm ready to go.” And then he added, "I could do four if forced to, but that would be—that mentally might be too much.” On Monday morning, perhaps trying to change the subject, he tweeted news of a contest to give supporters a chance to meet his family in Houston: "My brother is in. Are you?"