Bush escalates feud with Trump

Jeb Bush is stepping up his feud with Donald Trump with a new web video that cobbles together old footage of the real-estate magnate turned GOP front-runner backing liberal policies and politicians. 

The video by the former Florida governor’s campaign, called “The Real Donald Trump,” begins with a graphic announcing the “liberal things that Trump believes.” It goes on to play video clips showing Trump’s past support for abortion rights, raising taxes, single-payer health care, as well as him lauding now Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

{mosads}“I lived in New York City or Manhattan all my life, so my views are a little different than if I lived in Iowa,” Trump says in a clip from 1999.

Trump has led the polls in Iowa for more than one month after trampling candidates who party strategists had expected to hold the inside track. He tied with fellow outsider Ben Carson at 23 percent in a new Monmouth Iowa poll released Monday but remains in first place in the RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls, though only by 5 percentage points.

Bush, on the other hand, has fallen from the Hawkeye State’s top tier. He won just 5 percent of the Monmouth poll, good for sixth place, the same place he’s in overall, according to the RealClearPolitics Iowa average. 

The new Bush video includes a clip from a 2004 CNN interview where Trump said, “You’d be shocked that in many cases I’d probably identify as a Democrat.”  

When asked in 2007 who he would want negotiating with the Iranians, Trump told CNN he thought that “Hillary would do a good job.”

The clips aren’t new, but they demonstrate the Bush team’s line of attack that conservative voters can’t trust Trump’s party bonafides. Conventional wisdom pegged Bush as the establishment front-runner, so most experts believed earlier in the campaign that Bush’s best strategy to deal with Trump’s brash rhetoric was to ignore it and hope that he faded.

But Trump hasn’t gone away — his poll numbers have only increased, and he’s now on top in the three earliest nominating states as well as nationally.

So Bush’s team recently stepped up his criticism on Trump, as those skyrocketing poll numbers are paired with Bush’s lagging numbers.

The opening salvo came in response to Trump‘s immigration plan, which Bush panned as not grounded in conservative values. 

That prompted Trump to target Bush on the trail, hosting dueling events in New Hampshire where he panned the former governor as unelectable and “low-energy.”

The pair opened this week sparring over immigration and crime. Trump posted a short video on Instagram bashing Bush for referring to illegal immigration in 2014 as “an act of love.” The video pairs Bush’s comments with photos of undocumented immigrants accused of murder.

Bush’s team hit back Monday afternoon with a statement slamming Trump as soft on crime, noting his past support for Democratic politicians and his backing of legalizing certain drugs.

“That little [Trump] ad was just a complete mischaracterization of my thinking, it’s almost as though Donald Trump is acting like a Washington politician. That’s what they do,” Bush said Tuesday on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”

“The simple fact is our ad simply uses his own language, his own words, to say he is more Democrat than a Republican.”