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A truly remarkable thing happened Saturday night at the Republican debate in South Carolina. Donald Trump told Marco Rubio that George W Bush was responsible for 9/11 and didn’t keep us safe. Oh, and by the way, he told Jeb! that W lied about getting us into Iraq. And if people decide to impeach him, that’s okay with the Donald.
MR. DONALD TRUMP: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I wanna tell you. They lied.
JOHN DICKERSON: Okay.
Mr. Donald Trump: They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
(BOOING)
That was Donald Trump speaking on network television to a Republican audience.
Watch the tape at 25:57 with Jeb!, 30:44 with Rubio:
All this in conservative military-friendly South Carolina with a Bush-friendly (establishment tickets) audience.
Wow. This has implications.
Here’s the full 9/11 exchange with Rubio:
SEN. MARCO RUBIO:
09:35:50:00 I just wanna say, at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time that it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore. (CHEERING) (APPLAUSE) And you can– I think you can look back in hindsight and say a couple things, but he kept us safe. And not only did he keep us safe, but he– no matter what you wanna say about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was in violation of U.N. resolutions, in open violation, and the world wouldn’t do anything about it. And George W. Bush, enforced what the international community, refused to do, and again he kept us safe. And I am forever grateful to what he did for this–
09:36:29:00 (OVERTALK)
MR. DONALD TRUMP:
09:36:29:00 How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center (UNINTEL)? (CHEERING) (APPLAUSE) The World– I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down (BOOING) during the reign. He kept us safe? That’s not safe. That is not safe (UNINTEL).
You cannot put that toothpaste back in the tube. Libertarian populism may be dead, but authoritarian populism is alive and well.
Here’s Olivia Nuzzi making a point that cannot be overemphasized:
Trump’s candidacy is about strength, and his attacks on Jeb! (and by implication the entire Bush clan) are about weakness. W. failed on 9/11, he’s weak and so is his brother, goes the message. Trump is strong and no one messes with him. Not Bush, not Bin Laden.
That is a message that resonates with a yuuge chunk of the Republican base, especially if Trump applies it to the economy. That‘s why he can defend Social Security and be an apostate on taxes and get away with all of it.
Think of the implications to the Laffer curve crowd.
David Frum sums up:
For a decade and a half, Republicans have stifled internal debates about the George W. Bush presidency. They have preserved a more or less common front, by the more or less agreed upon device of not looking backward, not talking candidly, and focusing all their accumulated anger on the figure of Obama. The Trump candidacy has smashed all those coping mechanisms. Everything that was suppressed has been exposed, everything that went unsaid is being shouted aloud—and all before a jeering live audience, as angry itself as any of the angry men on the platform. Is this a functional political party? Is this an organization readying itself to govern? Or is it one more—most spectacular—show of self-evisceration by a party that has been bleeding on the inside for a decade and longer?
We have known for some time there’s major battle lines in the GOP, but winning Congress has kept that under the blanket. It’s out in the open now, and the Republican Party, if Trump wins South Carolina despite what he said on stage Saturday night, will never be the same again.
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