A war of words has erupted between Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and rival Jeb Bush over who’s to blame for the 9/11 attacks and how his brother George W Bush responded.
Trump’s latest broadside against a competitor in the bruising contest to win the Republican nomination in the 2016 election began on Friday when he suggested that George W Bush bore some responsibility for the attacks.
“He was President,” Mr Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Centre came down during his reign.”
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose defence of his brother’s war record has been patchy since he declared his presidential candidate, came out swinging on Twitter.
“How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump [the businessman’s Twitter handle] to criticise the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe,” wrote Mr Bush.
The billionaire businessman later said that he wasn’t blaming Bush’s brother for the attacks but pointed out that the attacks on the World Trade Centre happened during his watch and that the country wasn’t safe, contrary to his brother’s claims.
The reality TV star and property tycoon went further in an interview with Fox News on Sunday when he suggested that he would have prevented the 2001 attacks on the US because his immigration policies would have stopped the hijackers passing into the country.
“I am extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration,” Mr Trump told a Fox News Sunday talkshow. “I believe that if I were running things … I doubt that those people would have been in the country.”
The dispute is a reheat of a row that began at the second Republican primary debate last month when Bush defended his brother against Mr Trump’s attacks with the “he kept us safe” line.
In the months leading up to the formal announcement of his candidacy, Mr Bush tried to distance himself from the polarising presidential legacy of his brother, describing himself as “my own man.” Many of the foreign policy advisers he has hired to work on his campaign have worked for his brother, however.
Mr Trump’s attacks have since then forced Jeb onto the defensive, drawing him into speaking out publicly about his brother’s record.
The younger Bush, who trails Mr Trump by almost 16 points in the national polls, has said the businessman’s claims about his brother were akin to blaming Franklin D Roosevelt for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that brought the US into the Second World War.
"For him, it looks as though he's an actor playing a role of the candidate for president," Mr Bush said of Trump on CNN's Sunday talkshow, State of the Union, in the tit-for-tat row.
"Not boning up on the issues, not having a broad sense of the responsibilities of what it is to be a president. Across the spectrum of foreign policy, Mr Trump talks about things as though he's still on The Apprentice."
