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Jeb! on Trump and Clinton: “I Can’t Vote for Either One of Them”
Jeb Bush was interviewed by former GOP strategist Nicolle Wallace about his decision in November. And it appears he is both #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary.
“I’ve watched history unfold with kind of a front row seat,” said the former candidate, still smarting from his disastrous primary campaign. “The simple fact is there’s a threshold past which anybody who steps in the Oval Office must go past. And I don’t think either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump go past that threshold.”
“If you believe like I do that the Presidency is sacred ground and you want a President who upholds the Constitution — and I don’t think either of the candidates fulfill that primary kind of objective — then I can’t vote for either one of them.”
He gave a nod to the Libertarian ticket of Gov. Gary Johnson and Gov. William Weld, but fell far short of endorsing the third-party candidates. You can watch the interview here.
Published in General
This is exactly where I am.
Dang it, I don’t want to agree with Jeb. At least I don’t think government is a sacred thing, unless it is a sacred cow fattened for slaughter.
Gah, I can’t even watch that interview! If Jeb Bush hadn’t been so utterly delusional about the damage done to the Bush brand (on both left and right), and so clueless about the hopelessness of his Mr. Milquetoast campaign, and hadn’t sucked up so much donor money so early in the campaign, we might very well have Scott Walker or Marco Rubio at the top of the ticket instead of Donald Trump.
Honestly, after Barack Obama, I blame Jeb! for the ascendancy of Trump. Do us all a favor and withdraw from public life, Jeb.
As far a Jeb’s opinion on anything at all is concerned, my apathy runneth over.
The poster child for the #NeverTrump #NeverHillary Group. Embrace the Suck.
Jeb was barely a factor in the primary, I can’t imagine why anyone would care about his opinion in the general.
¿Who’s ¡Jeb!?
I’m not mad at Jeb for being delusional–most politicians are. The idiots who bug me are those who gave him so much money in hopes of ramming him down our throats. “Jeb is inevitable” reinforced the idea of isolated GOP elites like nothing else could have, and the middle finger it gave voters begged for an even bigger one on return.
How awesome would it have been if Jeb, in an homage to an homage to his father, had instead just said:
“Not gonna do it…wouldn’t be prudent”
Why are his glasses always crooked? Why, oh why?
I’m not a fan of Jeb! but I agree with him on this, and I don’t heap any more blame on him for the current GOP debacle than anyone else.
Bush suspended his campaign after the SC Primary on February 20. Rubio suspended his campaign three weeks later after the FL. Cruz threw in the towel in early May after the IN Primary. Republican primary voters knew exactly what they were doing in the two months that followed Jeb!’s departure when a plurality backed Trump.
I can’t blame Jeb! any more than I can blame any of the others for thinking that Trump was going to fizzle and get the boot from GOP voters. I was a Walker supporter. He had a big bankroll and burned through his cash early and couldn’t get past 15 other candidates and the reality show media. Neither could Jeb! And if there is a blame game for Trump, I can’t let Cruz off the hook for his playing nice with Trump through all those early months, when he was hoping he would benefit from a Trump fizzle. And how about Kasich and his masterful performance of Don Quixote?
I do blame Jeb! for all the money he spent torpedoing Rubio, who all the candidates attacked but who Bush particularly targeted.
In the end, only Rubio ever took the fight to Trump, and he did it much later in the game – and then Rubio took shots for not seeming presidential by fighting Trump at his level.
The fact of the matter is that Trump was the beneficiary of a media pushing the spectacle and an irate voter base that seemed to desire punishing impurity than winning an election. I would be very interested to see if there is Venn diagram of those who would not vote for Romney in 2012 because “he wasn’t a real conservative” and those who insist that Trump is the right guy for Republicans despite the fact that he’s a life-long Democrat.
The problem is that a plurality of Republican primary voters wanted to be angry and a majority of Democrat primary voters wanted to win. Republican voters are getting what they wanted, and they are going to get it good and hard.
What’s with the Jeb! hatred? Water under the bridge, folks. He might have read the tea leaves wrong, but good grief, there are far more despicable characters upon whom you can vent your ire. Anything he actually said in the above that you disagree with, or has the right come down with its own strain of Bush derangement syndrome?
I saw this stupid interview last night. I actually yelled at my TV “If you had dropped out when you should have, none of this might have happened, ya $%*&!) I think I scared my dog.
Ooooh, popcorn time.
Too irrelevant to be hated. Not even really a has-been: on the national scene, a never-was.
This. Glad I read the thread before typing the same darned thing…
Rand Paul was on Laura Ingraham’s show today. She played the sound clip of Jeb!’s rejection of Trump, then asked Paul about the pledge to support the nominee. Paul said (paraphrasing) that if his name is on a piece of paper, he will honor whatever it says.
I think this means that Jeb! is not an honorable person . . .
Darn it, now I am going to have to vote for Trump. There is no way that I can agree with Jeb!
Jeb is partly the reason we are in this mess. He picked off the good ones in his brilliant plan to be the GOP wall st endorsed stooge. Yes I believe this.
Rand is an honorable person.
Crooked ears. Depending on the severity of the ear mismatch , adjusting the glasses to level could be hopeless.
Just like Jeb’s candidacy always was. Hopeless, that is.
I think Cruz would have burned out all the sooner because to attack Trump at that stage would have been to attack a set of issues and voters only Trump was addressing. Cruz’s only hope was to vie for those same voters.
He should have never entered to begin with. In the run up to the start, every time I heard some story about Jeb responding to calls for him to run (riiight, like that ever really happened) and then how he was preliminarily exploring the potential possibility of running then I started to worry.
That’s ridiculous, opposing the trump clownshow has zero to do with supporting Jeb. Trump supporters owe Jeb and Mike Murphy a debt of gratitude for their opposition to legitimate candidates while Trump tried to figure out the English language
Yep…..I agree with Jeb on his specific point and at the same time blame him and his campaign (Mike Murphy) for selfishly helping get us in this situation.
Isn’t Jeb finally joining the rest of us rather than being a poster boy for a movement? If anything he’s late to the game.
I think it also means “If it wasn’t for my name on that [expletive] piece of paper, I’d be complaining about Trump right now too!”
The most cohesive argument is that by sucking up so much donor money and airtime at the beginning of the campaign, Jeb strangulated the campaigns of Walker, Perry, Jindal, Paul, etc. before they could gain any momentum, and thus left us with Trump as the only viable option.
There’s some merit to this argument, but only some. Sure, Jeb hoovered up money which might have otherwise gone to Walker*, but Trump had even less money and still won.
And if Walker* was so insecure of himself that he felt the need to drop out months before even a single vote was cast, there’s no way he would have had the temerity to survive the Trump meat grinder once the race got going – regardless of Jeb’s presence.
*Feel free to replace “Walker” with Perry, Jindal, Paul, Boaty McBoatface, or whichever candidate you thought should have won but was actually a total no-show.
More principled than Bernie Sanders.
Of course, that’s setting the bar pretty low…