Donald Trump (Donaldjtrump.com)
PALM BEACH, Florida – For someone who has never held political office, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is pummeling political insiders at their own game, according to radio host Rush Limbaugh.
“What he’s doing is bordering on political brilliance,” Limbaugh said on his national broadcast Tuesday. “And he is far more adept at modern-day politics than anybody in either party realizes.”
“In parlaying this outsider status of his,” Limbaugh continued, “he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
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Regarding the Republican establishment, Limbaugh noted, “They don’t know which way is up anymore. They don’t know what’s up. They don’t know what’s down. They don’t know what’s sideways. They are just totally bamboozled and confused.”
As an example, Limbaugh cited Trump’s comments about former President George W. Bush, concerning the days surrounding the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as Trump told Bloomberg News last Friday that “the World Trade Center came down during (former President Bush’s) reign.”
On Saturday, Trump expounded on that in a phone interview, saying, “You always have to look to the person at the top.
“Do I blame George Bush? I only say that he was the president at the time, and you know, you could say the buck stops here.”
Jeb Bush responded on Twitter, saying, “How pathetic for [Donald Trump] to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
Limbaugh analyzed the exchanges of the past few days, and said: “What Trump was trying to do, what he succeeded in doing was tie Jeb to his brother, Bush to Bush, not in an incompetence way – maybe Trump meant that; I don’t know – but what he was trying to do politically was to further the thought in people’s minds that we don’t need another Bush, for crying out loud. We got a Clinton over here, another Bush, we just had a Bush, we don’t need another Bush, and he was trying to tie Jeb to Bush, to W in a way that was not positive, and Jeb took the bait.”
“The point is that Jeb just fell for Trump’s, whatever you want to call it, trick and immediately began to defend his brother in those words and just started reminding everybody about that era, which, whether you like it or not, people do not have fond memories of. So from a political standpoint, it was a very successful venture and effort that Trump had made.”
Rush Limbaugh
CNN’s Jake Tapper agreed with Limbaugh’s premise of tying Jeb to his older brother.
“Elections are about the future and they’re about outsiders, especially this election,” Tapper said. “So even if Jeb Bush ends up winning this debate on its merits – and I don’t know that he will – he will have been tied even further to yesterday and not tomorrow.”
Limbaugh said there’s a sizable number of people, especially in the GOP establishment, who thought Trump’s candidacy would have been over by now.
“What is becoming apparent to them,” Limbaugh explained, “is that Trump is serious, and he’s far more serious than anybody in the establishment has ever acknowledged.”
Limbaugh also noted how Trump sounded the alarm about a terrorist attack on a major U.S. city nine months before the onslaught of 9/11, and he even named Osama bin Laden by name.
“I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the bombing of the Trade Center [1993] look like kids playing with firecrackers,” wrote Trump in his 2000 book, ‘The America We Deserve.’ No sensible analyst rejects this possibility, and plenty of them, like me, are not wondering if but when it will happen.”
Limbaugh noted: “He’s got the book that he wrote 19 months beforehand to give himself the credibility and credence on this. He’s not just blabber-mouthing. He’s not just doing his, ‘I’m the greatest. We’ll be the greatest! I got the smartest; I’ll get the smartest. It’s gonna be fine.’ He’s getting specific and reminding people what he said and what he felt, what he intuited 19 months before 9/11.”
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