Jeb Bush struck out to defend his late father, George H W Bush, after Donald Trump initiated calls to investigate the 41st president.
At a rally in Arizona on Sunday, Trump attacked several former presidents for being guilty of the same act that earned him a visit from federal agents this past summer at his Mar-a-Lago resort: storing classified documents after their tenure in office.
He initially accused President Barack Obama of transporting over 30 million pages of documents to a former furniture store in Chicago, a claim that has regularly been refuted by the National Archives who noted that the federal agency was responsible for relocating unclassified documents to a secure federal facility in Chicago.
He then went on to accuse former president Bush, who died in 2018, of hoarding millions of documents inside a combination bowling alley-meets-Chinese restaurant.
“[He] took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant,” the former president said of his predecessor during a rally held in Mesa, Arizona. “They put them together. And it had a broken front door and broken windows. Other than that it was quite secure.”
When tossing out these examples of previous commander-in-chief’s being “guilty” of the same acts that he’s allegedly been engaged in, he pressed on about why they too hadn’t been investigated.
These remarks, though unsubstantiated by the one-term president, were inflammatory enough to prompt the son of the 41st president to respond to them online.
“I am so confused. My dad enjoyed a good Chinese meal and enjoyed the challenge of 7 10 split. What the heck is up with you?” tweeted Jeb Bush on Sunday, while resharing a clip of Trump making the accusatory remarks about his late father. (A 7-10 split is a bowling term that describes when a player takes out all but the last two pins in the line-up.)
This isn’t the first time the two Republicans have come to public blows, as during the lead-up to the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries – a race that both men had thrown their names in the hat for – Mr Trump would frequently attack the former Florida governor.
Among the various insults that the former president has lobbed in the direction of Jeb over the years, he has at times called him “an embarrassment to his family”, accused him of being “weak” to his face and has tied his reputation to his brother, George W Bush, and suggested that he bore responsibility for the war in Iraq, calling it “a big, fat mistake”.
