If Jeb Bush was looking to draw Donald Trump into a new fight, he’s succeeded.
Trump on Tuesday fired off a series of tweets knocking the former Florida governor, adding the next layer to the pair’s ongoing feud, which Bush rekindled last week during CNN’s GOP debate.
Trump knocked Bush’s campaign as a “disaster,” accused him of using special interest dollars “to look like a tough guy” and mocked Bush’s performance in last week’s event. And of course, Trump reprised his consistent line of attack against Bush, calling him “weak and low energy.”
The comments came after the Bush campaign began running a series of digital ads that include Bush’s criticism of Trump during the last Republican debate, in which Bush branded Trump the “chaos candidate” and slammed his policy proposals as lacking seriousness.
“Weak and low energy @JebBush, whose campaign is a disaster, is now doing ads against me,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “Why doesn’t @JebBush, in his ads, show my answer to his statement in the debate?”
“Will @JebBush, in his phony advertising campaign, show himself asking me to apologize to his wife in the debate?” he added, referring to a moment between the two candidates in a previous debate.
The tweets came after the two candidates exchanged verbal blows during their respective campaign stops on Saturday, during which Trump slammed Bush as an “embarrassment” and Bush called Trump a “jerk.”
Bush took to Twitter himself on Tuesday to fire back at Trump, suggesting that he is getting under the Republican front-runner’s skin.
“Based on his tweets, @realdonaldtrump gets pretty upset when he’s called out for his unserious, Hillaryesque foreign ‘policy’ views,” Bush tweeted.
The back and forth between the two candidates marks a revival of the pair’s feuding, which defined the start of the presidential campaign, when Bush was viewed as the most likely candidate to become the party’s nominee.
Trump launched a flurry of attacks on Bush, repeatedly insisting that Bush was a “low energy” candidate not suited to lead the country.
Bush, like many of his fellow Republican contenders, initially sought to dismiss Trump’s attacks and largely avoided firing back.
But Bush came out swinging last week during the CNN GOP debate and his campaign has consistently responded to every attack Trump has launched on their candidate, marking a new chapter in the Republican presidential race.