ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Jeb Bush, the man who was supposed to be the Republican nominee for president in 2016 until his birth-right was stolen from him by the crass, vulgar and despicable Donald Trump, has taken his psychological obsession with his own failure to a new low… he has attacked Trump’s 12-year-old son, Barron.

Speaking at Yale University, the former Florida Governor first claimed he would not get into a re-hash of the 2016 election (what would he have to say about it, anyway? He got 3 delegates after spending $150 million of other people’s money) But, according to Yale News, he eventually exorcised some demons by looking at the sunny side of his crushing defeat.

At one point, Bush described the current president as “Republican in basically name only.” And earlier in his speech, Bush said that after the 2016 Republican primary in South Carolina, he returned home to children who “actually love me.” His comment was met with raucous laughter from the crowd, and several audience members interviewed after the event said they interpreted Bush’s comment as a jab at Trump.

Raucous laughter from elitist, Ivy League students! Well… that should translate into a renewed run for the White House, right? Good on you, Jeb!

But… what, exactly, are these snobs laughing at? Donald Trump’s children not loving him. That’s funny, right? I mean, is anything funnier than Donald Trump coming home to his 12-year-old son’s loathing? And surely Jeb Bush’s secret torment over not getting his turn in the White House after his father and brother got their turn justifies an attack on a pre-teen boy.

Oh sure, Jeb meant Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka, the adult Trump children who serve as public surrogates for the president, right? Surely he didn’t mean the young child of the president. Well, Bush didn’t make that distinction, did he? And when Barron sees the headlines flash across his television or smartphone, he won’t see that distinction, will he?

If there was one lesson all Americans were supposed to learn from the 2016 GOP primary it was that Trump may have won, but he was classless, vulgar and insulting while his establishment opponents, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, were dignified, substantive and refused to get stuck in the muck of Trump’s slimy tactics.

And now we have Jeb, the epitome of establishment dignity and superior moral preening, lowering himself to the lowest possible attack: A minor child who has shunned the spotlight and is barely seen in public while he navigates the hazardous shoals of instant fame and bitter DC politics.

Jeb should know better.

And the minions of the Republican establishment who gleefully tittered on Twitter over the nasty slam should know better as well. But the other thing we’ve learned since the 2016 election is that in the Trump era, anything goes in politics and media. If you can score a direct hit against the President, no argument is off limits, even the once sacrosanct realm of a president’s minor children.

Just another dispatch from The Swamp that seems to get murkier and slimier day after day.

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