Donald Trump kicked his ongoing battle with the Bush political dynasty into high gear Sunday morning, not only repeating his suggestion that former President George W. Bush failed to keep the country safe ahead of the September 11 attacks in 2001, but asserting that if he had been president himself, the attacks wouldn’t have happened.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, Trump said that his statements about the 9/11 attacks were a reaction to former Florida governor Jeb Bush, one of his opponents in the Republican presidential primary, insisting that as president his brother had kept the country “safe.”
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“The World Trade Center just fell down,” Trump said. “Am I trying to blame him? I’m not blaming anybody, but the World Trade Center came down, so when he said we were safe? That’s not safe. We lost 3,000 people. It was the worst catastrophe in the history of this country.”
Pressed by Wallace on whether it was reasonable to blame Bush for the attacks, and on whether it would have been different under a Trump presidency, the billionaire was adamant that his policies could have prevented the attack in the first place.
“I would have been much different, I must tell you,” he said. “Somebody said, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been any different.’ Well, it would have been. I am extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration. I’m extremely tough on people coming into this country. I believe that if I were running things, I doubt that those people would have been in the country. So, there’s a good chance those people would not have been in our country.”
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Trump has been in a battle of words with the former Florida governor over the question of responsibility for 9/11 for the past few days. Over the weekend, Bush called the real estate mogul and former reality television star “pathetic” on Twitter for even raising the issue.
On Sunday, a plainly exasperated Bush appeared on CNN, and again went after Trump.
“Look, my brother responded to a crisis and he did it as you would hope a president would do,” he told host Jake Tapper. “He united the country, he organized our country, and he kept us safe. And there’s no denying that. The great majority of Americans believe that. And I don’t know why he keeps bringing this up. It doesn’t show that he’s a serious person as it relates to being commander in chief and being the architect of a foreign policy.”
He went on to mock Trump’s vague pronouncements about how he would handle the ongoing three-way civil war in Syria, saying “He talks about things like he’s still on The Apprentice,” he said, referring to the television show on which Trump starred for several years.