This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The rancour between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush exploded on the debate stage on Saturday, as the two traded insults over the legacy of George W Bush’s fateful decision to invade Iraq.



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Trump and Bush’s fiery exchanges – which dominated a debate that began with tributes to the supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, who died earlier in the day – were as personal and vicious as any moment so far in the 2016 presidential election. The Republican frontrunner ferociously challenged the Bush family legacy and GOP orthodoxy on foreign policy.

At the end of one clash, Ohio governor John Kasich was left slack-jawed.

“This is just crazy,” he said.

In the spin room afterwards, J Hogan Gidley, a former Huckabee and Santorum adviser, said he had never seen anything like it: “You get a zinger now and again but nothing like this. You never see a candidate call another a flat-out liar.”

On a night of Republican bloodletting that also saw Ted Cruz condemned as just that – a liar – the back and forth between Trump and Bush focused on national security and, in particular, the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It came two days before George W Bush is set to campaign at his brother’s side in South Carolina, where Republicans vote on Saturday.



Trump openly accused the Bush administration of knowingly lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an invasion of Iraq in 2003, a step beyond anything that most Democrats, let alone any Republican, have said.

“Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” Trump said at the debate in Greenville, South Carolina. “George Bush made a mistake, we can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”

He added, forcefully: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction – there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

Bush fired back, showing his most fight in any debate yet.

“I am sick and tired of him going after my family,” he said. “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe and I’m proud of what he did.”

The two men even squabbled about Bush’s mother. The former Florida governor said proudly, “My mother was the strongest person I know.”

Trump’s response: “Maybe she should be running.”

All the while, Trump was lustily booed by the audience.

Trump has long bragged about being against the Iraq war. No clear statement from 2003 has ever been published.

Eventually, Marco Rubio jumped into the scrum in defense of George W Bush but Trump fired back: “I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush.”

Rubio’s response was to cast blame for 9/11 on Bill Clinton’s failure to kill Osama bin Laden during his administration.

The pair clashed again over immigration. Trump said Bush’s policy was the least effective of any candidate on stage.

“He is so weak on illegal immigration, it’s laughable,” he said.

Bush responded that Trump has shown weakness during the campaign when he disparaged women, Latinos, people with disabilities, and the senator and Vietnam veteran John McCain.

But Trump wasn’t finished. In a bizarre riposte, he said: “Two days ago he said he would take his pants off and moon everybody.” Bush pulled a puzzled face at that one, a reference to a comment the former Florida governor made to the Boston Globe’s Matt Viser.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeb Bush and Donald Trump trade blows. Footage: CBS News

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Afterwards, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, suggested jokingly that Bush had been more spirited than usual because “he had a Monster [Energy Drink] on the way in”.

He then simply said Bush “has to do something because he’s becoming very desperate”.

The Trump operative spoke with visible scorn. “You know why he’s doing poorly,” he asked. “Because his message is terrible, people don’t want another Bush in this country. That’s the bottom line. They don’t want another politician.”

In contrast, he said, “we talked about the things the American people talked around their dinner table. I think it’s very clear Mr Trump’s positions don’t change based on polling numbers and he talks about it just like you would with your family.”

Former Minnesota senator Norm Coleman, a Bush supporter, said Trump was “out of control”. He told the Guardian Trump “crosses the line a lot but at a certain point of [the] line, the idea that Bush is responsible for 9/11, that’s conspiracy stuff, that’s fringe stuff”.

The debate took place only a few hours after the death of Scalia. The six candidates on stage held a moment of silence before the debate began and then stood almost unanimously against the Senate confirming any Obama nominee to replace him in the next 11 months. As Trump put it, Senate Republicans should “delay, delay, delay”.



Rubio, the Florida senator, said it was not unprecedented for no appointment to be made in an election year.

“It has been over 80 years since a lame duck president has appointed a supreme court justice,” he said, noting that, assuming a Republican victory, “someone on this stage will get to choose the balance of the supreme court”.

Cruz echoed his arguments, describing Scalia as “a legal giant” and claiming “we are one justice away” from defeats for conservative positions on abortion, gun rights and religious liberty.

“The Senate needs to stand strong,” he said, “and say, ‘We’re not going to give up the US supreme court for a generation by allowing Barack Obama to make one more liberal appointee.’”

The only candidate to potentially embrace a nomination was Kasich, who suggested “if you were to nominate somebody, let’s have [Obama] pick somebody that’s going to have unanimous approval, and such widespread approval across the country that this could happen without a lot of recrimination”.

However, by the end of his answer, the Ohio governor conceded: “We ought to let the next president of the United States decide who is going to run that supreme court.”

As in many previous Republican debates, there was a heated exchange on immigration reform. Cruz argued that Rubio had been too soft and criticised him for supporting a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Rubio, eager to recover from a disastrously robotic performance at the last debate, contended that Cruz had once supported legalisation and accused him of repeatedly lying.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Republican candidates discuss Antonin Scalia, who died on Saturday. Footage: CBS News.

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Cruz claimed that Rubio had said in a Spanish-language TV interview that he would not revoke Obama’s executive actions. Rubio responded: “I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn’t speak Spanish.”

Cruz trotted out his rudimentary Spanish language skills as disproof.

Cruz and Trump also tangled over the frontrunner’s conservative credentials. The Texas senator reiterated an attack that he has frequently used on the stump, saying that the New York real estate mogul has spent most of his life as a liberal Democrat who supports socialised medicine and partial birth abortion.

Trump responded by telling Cruz: “You are the single biggest liar. You are probably worse than Jeb Bush.”

Cruz fired back, noting that Trump said an interview that he was supportive of Planned Parenthood. Trump responded by insisting “not when it comes to abortion, not when it comes to abortion”.

The febrile mood continued, at times closer to gladiatorial combat in the colosseum than a policy debate over the future of the nation.

At one point, Kasich warned: “I think we’re fixin’ to lose the election to Hillary Clinton if we don’t stop this.”