Just as the political ground had shifted under his father, leaving him befuddled and looking at his watch, so it shifted under Jeb, leaving him befuddled and tapping his foot.

Despite all the talk about civility, the Bushes threw out the red meat whenever they had to, from Lee Atwater and Willie Horton in ’88 to W.’s supporters whispering in 2000 that John McCain came home from Hanoi with snakes in his head, to the W. 2004 campaign strategy of encouraging gay marriage ballot initiatives to rile up the evangelicals, to Jeb spending a fortune on ads this winter eviscerating the character of the man he deemed the disloyal protégé, Marco Rubio.

Winning was always more important than gentility. That’s what happened in 2000, when the family had to pressure Jeb to help purloin Florida. In return, W. came out of his oil-painting exile to try and deliver South Carolina for Jeb.

South Carolina was the place the whole byzantine sibling rivalry drama was going to be made right. The Bushes always thought their sober and studious second son would be president, but the prodigal son shoved Jeb out of the way. Now Jeb would get his due.

Except that the inflammatory Trump, who delights in breaking the fourth wall, was perfectly happy to shatter the convention in Republican circles that W. “kept us safe,” as Jeb kept saying.

Trump stunned everyone by pointing out the obvious: W. and Condi were not on the ball before 9/11, when W. was mountain-biking and ignoring memos headlined, as Bill Maher drily put it, “Osama bin Laden is standing right behind you.” Then, after 9/11, they played right into Osama’s recruiting plans by invading and occupying two Muslim countries, instead of simply going after the guilty party, as W. had promised to do when he yelled through the bullhorn at ground zero.

Trump held the Bushes accountable for the trumped-up war. W.’s arrogant and delusional administration pulled the wool over Americans’ eyes about the Iraq invasion, which has ended up costing us trillions and killing and maiming hundreds of thousands. Even though Poppy Bush’s circle has always assumed that Jeb was on their side, believing that the invasion was a mistake because it would shatter the Middle East, Jeb stumbled around on that question and ended up defending his brother’s indefensible war. He even shocked his father’s circle by putting out a list of foreign policy advisers for his campaign that included one of the war’s woolly-headed architects, Paul Wolfowitz.