Still from the “Briefing” advertisement, by Right to Rise USA. Right to Rise USA (YouTube)

As conservatives watch Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, their reactions often mirror the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. You can find conservatives in each of the five stages. David Brooks proudly proclaimed that he would remain in the denial stage even if Trump raised his hand and took the oath of office next January. Many more conservatives remain in the anger stage. National Review recently collected twenty-two conservative writers to condemn Trump, whom the magazine called “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”

Meanwhile, as conservatives shift between the stages, there’s an effort to figure out how things could have gone so wrong. This usually takes the form of blaming Trump’s rise on someone else. For a while, the main villain on the right was Barack Obama, whose failures, it has been argued, gave Trump his opening. You can read pundit versions of this case here, here, here, here, here, and here. But the most prominent member of the blame-Trump-on-Obama faction is undoubtedly Jeb Bush, who made the case recently in an interview with NPR:

I would argue that Donald Trump is in fact a creature of Barack Obama. ... But for Barack Obama, Donald Trump's effect would not be nearly as strong as it is. We're living in a divided country right now, and we need political leaders, rather than continuing to divide as both President Obama and Donald Trump [do], to unite us.

It may be confusing to hear George W. Bush’s younger brother place the blame for political polarization entirely on Obama. In any event, a new argument explaining Trump’s rise and persistence atop the polls has been gaining currency in conservative circles this week: it’s Jeb’s fault. Stephen Hayes has the best articulation of the case in a piece in The Weekly Standard, where he writes that Jeb Bush’s Super PAC, Right to Rise, which raised more than a hundred million dollars last year, has spent most of its time nuking Marco Rubio while barely saying a word about Trump. This has had the perverse effect of knocking out—or at least knocking down—the person who may be most able to defeat Trump. As Hayes points out, Mike Murphy, Bush’s longtime adviser, who runs Right to Rise, explained the strategy in interviews last year with the Washington Post (“Trump is, frankly, other people's problem”) and Bloomberg (“I'd love a two-way race with Trump at the end").

As Bush sank and Rubio rose in the polls last fall, Bush’s theory of the race was that Rubio, the candidate many mainstream conservatives have championed as their best chance to defeat Trump and Ted Cruz, was his immediate obstacle. The Bush onslaught against Rubio may end up being the most expensive and sustained negative attack of 2016.

The Bush campaign rejects the theory. “Jeb has spent more money criticizing Trump than anyone, and he has laid out repeatedly the case that Trump is neither conservative nor fit to be Commander-in-Chief,” Tim Miller, Bush’s spokesman, said. “Every candidate has had the opportunity to take him on, and Jeb has chosen to do so in the most aggressive manner.”

Bush has indeed been more outspoken about Trump, while Rubio has generally avoided attacking the front-runner. But Bush’s Super PAC has been focussed on Rubio. In early December, Right to Rise ran an ad that targeted Cruz, Trump, and Rubio. The ad showed a picture of the President’s desk in the Oval Office. “When the attacks come here, the person behind this desk will have to protect your family,” a male announcer said. Behind the desk, slightly silly pictures of Bush’s three opponents were cropped into the picture, one after the other. “Will he be impulsive and reckless, like Donald Trump? Will he have voted to dramatically weaken counterterrorism surveillance, like Ted Cruz? Will he have skipped crucial national-security hearings and votes just to campaign, like Marco Rubio?”

But, by late December, the group had mostly given up running pro-Bush ads or mentioning any candidate but Rubio. In “Briefing,” Rubio is depicted as an absentee senator who skipped crucial intelligence briefings after the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks in order to raise money in California and New Orleans. “Politics first, that's the Rubio way.” Then, in “Promotion,” the Super PAC continued the attack on Rubio’s missed votes, calling Rubio a “Washington politician” who “doesn't show up for work but wants a promotion.”

Most recently, the group depicted Rubio as a weathervane who “opposed amnesty,” “flipped and worked with liberal Chuck Schumer to co-author the path-to-citizenship bill,” “threatened to vote against it,” “voted for it,” and then “supported his own DREAM Act” before “he abandoned it.” The tag line was the toughest yet: “Marco Rubio. Just another Washington politician we can't trust.”

The funniest anti-Rubio ad, which reveals a bit of Murphy’s mischievous sense of humor, is called “Boots,” and features an actor wearing a suit and a pair of Rubio’s famous thick-heeled shoes—a Christmas present from his wife—dancing in front of a psychedelic backdrop to the music of Nancy Sinatra’s "These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” The lyrics have been modified: