Jeb Bush apologized to his major donors in a conference call Wednesday after dropping out of the Republican presidential race following his disastrous finish in the South Carolina primary.
“I’m sorry that it didn’t turn out the way that I intended,” Bush told his donors, according to The New York Times. “When I launched the campaign in front of three or four thousand people in Miami, I anticipated a different result.”
“The reality was that you had a year of disruption, a year of outsiders making a compelling case to people who were deeply disaffected and angry, and I just didn’t get the breakthrough that I needed in the early states and felt it was important to not move on without a clear path to winning,” Bush added.
Bush distanced himself from his famous brother George W. Bush until South Carolina, when he held a rally with his brother that failed to boost him in the polls. Mocked for his “low-energy” demeanor and the odd exclamation point next to his first name on his campaign logo, Bush managed to beat establishment rival Marco Rubio in New Hampshire, but otherwise his campaign was a complete dud.
Jeb Bush will, however, be remembered as the object of many of Donald Trump’s best slams and put-downs in the Republican debates and on the campaign trail. Seemingly obsessed by Bush, and the Bush family in general, Trump managed to marginalize other candidates by focusing his scorn on the other biggest guy on the stage: Jeb.
Jeb Bush gave Trump the opportunity to bash the Bush administration’s national security and Iraq War policies in South Carolina, which provided an historic moment for the Republican Party.