CBS News
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2025–2026
3:18 · 8.1M views · Feb 14, 2016
CBS News clip from a 2016 Republican primary debate in which Donald Trump attacks George W. Bush over 9/11 and the Iraq War while Jeb Bush defends his brother. It is a short, heated exchange on national security records.
Cited as the moment Trump supposedly broke the Bush dynasty's hold on the GOP by making the Iraq War a wedge issue.
8 comments from Hacker News
> The USA’s global influence and entanglements goes all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine and grew substantially after WWII The U.S. had virtually no engagement with the world outside the western hemisphere between the GOP’s formation in 1854 and World War I. Between Lincoln’s election in 1861 to World War I tariff rates exceeded 40%: [LINK] > It still doesn’t explain how he won the GOP primary the first time and continues to maintain a cult-like following. He won the primary because he curb-stomped Jeb Bush on live TV and called for immigration bans when Rubio was proposing amnesty. this video . He maintains a cult-like following because he’s the first republican in recent memory to actually deliver conservative victories instead of blowing all their political capital on wars. Since he took office in 2016, conservatives have ended affirmative action, overturned Roe , cut border crossings nearly to zero, established a legal framework for prosecuting DEI under the civil rights laws, ended disparate impact, shut down entire federal agencies, raised tariffs for the first time since the 1960s. We might get a $45 billion budget for ICE! I’m not even covering everything in the EOs, which have gone under the radar because everyone is flipping out over tariffs. Trump makes clear that Bush/Cheney republicans weren’t even trying. > If the poll numbers are to be believed, isolationists and nationalists never made up more than a slim percentage of the American electorate until very recent
Trump launched MAGA by attacking the Iraq war, and the Bush family. This is 2008: “When she first got in and was named speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person. I like her a lot. But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost – it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think would’ve been a wonderful thing,” Trump told Blitzer in the interview. “Impeaching him?” Blitzer asked. “Absolutely. For the war. For the war,” said Trump, referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies, and I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant and they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies. By lying. By saying they had weapons of mass destruction. By saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.” And in the 2015 Debate attack Jeb. this video
You think random factoids are driving Trump’s viewpoint? Trump overthrew the Bush dynasty by eviscerating Jeb over the Iraq War: this video . Now, neocons want to chalk that up as bad execution of an otherwise sound ideology. But you don’t think that Trump’s supporters could genuinely disagree with that assessment—think that the underlying problem is that america is too willing to intervene militarily in places that don’t directly affect the U.S.? You think that view is driven by Russian propaganda? The way I see it, Ukraine is the test case for the foreign policy populist Democrats have long supported. The Cold War is over. The likelihood that Putin will invade Germany or France next is low. Regional wars are just that, and we should let them play out without getting involved. Otherwise you’re still subscribing to Reaganite neoconservatism—you’re just quibbling about the details of whether to involve the american military empire in any particular skirmish.
I don’t know if you’ve been following American politics. But the guy who is currently President captured the GOP by basically beheading the next-in-line of the Bush dynasty that was responsible for those “past 20 years.” this video The criticism of decades of American foreign policy was finally vindicated. So there is very little appetite to give up that achievement by getting embroiled in yet another war that’s billed as “easy” and “just” this time (they all were—remember, “we will be greeted as liberators?”)
People forget that Iraq was a key wedge issue which allowed Trump to gain mindshare within the GOP: this video A fairly optimistic way to spin this situation is as follows. Either it somehow works out for Venezuela, in which case we effectively helped millions of people Homer Simpson style. Or, more likely, failure disgraces Trump the same way it disgraced GWB. Then (fingers crossed) we elect a humbler, more realistic leader who works to rebuild the country we wrecked, and we can move on from the Trump era.