Jeb Throws Wrench in 2020 as He Begins Quest To Take Down Trump
Jeb(!) is back! And he wants someone to primary Donald Trump — preferably someone, unlike him, who has some sort of shot.
The former Florida governor and one-time 2016 front-runner — who ended up an also-ran by the time the primary season actually started — told former Obama adviser David Axelrod during a podcast interview that he thinks someone ought to run against the president in the 2020 presidential primaries.
“I think someone should run just because Republicans ought to be given a choice,” Bush said, according to Fox News.
“It’s hard to beat a sitting president, but to have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative, I think it’s important.
“And our country needs to have competing ideologies that people — that are dynamic, that focus on the world we’re in and the world we’re moving toward rather than revert back to a nostalgic time,” he added, a clear stab at “Make America Great Again.”
Serious primary challenges to sitting presidents, at least under the current system, are rare and generally do little aside from damaging the president in the upcoming election.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan mounted a serious primary challenge to President Gerald Ford. That challenge came under unusual circumstances, since Ford had acceded to the presidency after Richard Nixon’s resignation and hadn’t even been elected as the vice president. Ford won by the slimmest of margins — it wasn’t until the beginning of the Republican National Convention in Kansas City that the nomination was finally resolved in Ford’s favor — and he ended up losing the general election to Jimmy Carter.
Four years later, Carter himself was the subject of a primary challenge by Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. Kennedy was even considered an early front-runner until a disastrous CBS News interview in which Kennedy failed to convincingly explicate why he actually wanted the office. Like Ford, Carter pulled out the nomination despite a heated convention. Like Ford, Carter also lost the general election — to Ronald Reagan.
While former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan’s challenge to President George H.W. Bush in 1992 never put the president in serious jeopardy of losing the nomination, Buchanan’s populist candidacy was still far more successful than it had any right to be on paper. It again ended in a tendentious convention best remembered for Buchanan’s “Culture War” speech. And again, Bush lost.
As for whether that object lesson seems lost on his son, perhaps it’s not. During the interview, Bush evinced enough antipathy toward Trump that it seems plausible enough he might want the president gone no matter who ends up at 1600 Pennsylvania.
Jeb Bush tells @davidaxelrod that President Trump falls short in “symbolic” presidential duties.
“It’s important during national tragedies, it’s important in moments of crisis, it’s important in the day-to-day creation of culture that helps sustain us.” https://t.co/ukrUaW0A05 pic.twitter.com/jlHIBdVAIN
— CNN (@CNN) March 16, 2019
“We haven’t had a major crisis to deal with, but this unilateralism or going-alone-ism I think is really dangerous,” Bush told Axelrod about Trump’s foreign policy.
“Our friends no longer believe they can trust the United States and our enemies, in many cases, feel emboldened by this approach,” he said. “I think it defies the…bipartisan kind of consensus on foreign policy that has, by and large, kept America safe.
“You can honestly say he’s done good things in terms of policy and applaud them,” Bush added, praising the president’s judicial appointments, regulatory policies and tax cuts. “I think the symbolic, you know, the kingly duties of the presidency, that’s where he falls short, and it’s important.”
It’s perfectly understandable that Jeb, a man who had to add an exclamation point to his logo back in 2016 to simulate the slightest amount of excitement around his campaign, probably doesn’t like the man who constantly mocked him for being “low energy.”
Nor is it surprising that Bush is unimpressed with how Trump carries out “the kingly duties of the presidency.” (As a side note, Trump has — at the very, very least — done America a great service by preventing a man who talks about “the kingly duties of the presidency” in serious tones from inhabiting the executive manse for four years.)
The question is whether or not Bush cares enough about those “kingly duties” to cede those policy wins to whomever the Democrats nominate in 2020.
As for serious challengers to the Republican nomination, well, good luck finding one. Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, another Trump enemy, was long considered the potential savior for NeverTrump stragglers, but he seems inclined to stay out of the race. The lead contender being bandied about at present (by the likes of Vanity Fair magazine) is Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, whose national profile is such that if you knew he was governor of Maryland before I told you, odds are that you’re from Maryland.
Given Trump’s considerable fundraising advantage already, there’s no realistic chance that any individual the Bill Kristols of the world dredge up will do anything but divide the Republican electorate. We’ve seen how this ends.
And yet that’s just what Jeb Bush is calling for Trump to face in his re-election fight. It’s tough to read this as anything but one last effort by the GOP establishment — personified by Jeb Bush — to use the general election of 2020 to take down the man who defeated it in the primary campaign of 2016.
That would mean the “good things” that Trump’s done “in terms of policy” will be far more likely pass into the hands of a Democrat president — and that president will come out of a field which is generally inclined to embrace things like high taxes, court-packing and increased government regulation.
But, hey, at least they’ll be appropriately kingly.
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