‘Can He Really Not Keep Track?’ CNN Hosts Roast Trump Over Jeb Bush Gaffe

CNN anchor Dana Bash and CNN analyst and PBS Firing Line host Margaret Hoover roasted ex-President Donald Trump over a gaffe in which he appeared to confuse former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush with ex-President George W. Bush.

Trump delivered a speech in Summerville, SC on Monday that produced several viral moments, including one section in which the former president ranted about whales and windmills and another in which he riffed on the 2016 election by slamming Jeb Bush for “getting us into the Middle East!”

On Tuesday afternoon’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, Bash and Hoover roasted Trump over the miscue, and Hoover suggested a pattern of Trump being “confused” — like when he recently bragged about beating President Barack Obama in an election:

DANA BASH: Lot of Bushes in politics, and it appears Donald Trump can’t keep them straight. Here’s what he said in South Carolina about the 2016 campaign.

DONALD TRUMP: When I came here, everyone thought Bush was going to win. And then they took a poll and they found out Trump was up by about 50 points. Everyone said. What’s going on right here? They thought Bush, because Bush supposedly was a military person. Great! You know what he was a mili– He got us into the, he got us into the Middle East. How did that work out? Right?

But they all thought that Bush might win. Jeb! Remember Jeb? He used he used the word Jeb! He didn’t use the word Bush. I said, you mean he’s ashamed of the last name? And then they immediately started using the name Bush.

DANA BASH: Our reporters and analysts are back with us. Margaret, you worked for one of the Bushes, just one, right?

MARGARET HOOVER: Hard to keep them all straight, right?

DANA BASH: Yeah. And listen–

MARGARET HOOVER: Okay! It’s not actually that hard to keep them all straight!

DANA BASH: All straight. Well, listen, I mean, this is, this isn’t, just kind of a run of the mill thing. It’s — he goes after Joe Biden all the time for things that he says that may be a little bit off. Maybe this is like, okay.

MARGARET HOOVER: Should we apply this same yardstick to him?

DANA BASH: Or — Yeah, like it’s human.

MARGARET HOOVER: Well. What we should do is scrutinize all of them equally and try to make a sound determination. There is now a running clock, a running sort of marks on the wall of times where potentially Donald Trump is getting confused. I don’t, we need to keep looking for data points and see if that’s true. But he did, grasping at straws, not think of the person he ran against in 2020. Just a couple of weeks ago and then said it was Obama. He never, never ran against Obama. And then in this case, he forgot that he was running against Jeb and confused the brothers suggested that Jeb Bush got us into the Iraq war. I mean, I recognize there are three Bushes that have been on the national stage, a father, a son, and a brother.

But we all can keep track of that. I mean, maybe it’s our jobs. Maybe regular Americans aren’t paying attention to this all the time can’t. But it’s our job to keep track of this and try to determine and report accurately what’s going on with the candidate for president of the United States and a former president. Can he really not keep track? Or is he just dismissive and thinks it’s not important?

Watch above via CNN’s Inside Politics.