Donald Trump on Jeb Bush attack: He’s a ‘very low-energy kind of guy,’ ‘had to do something’

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Wednesday that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had no choice but to attack him, again labeling his 2016 GOP rival as “low-energy.”

“Well, I think he had really no choice. He’s doing very poorly in the polls, he’s a very low-energy kind of guy, and he had to do something,” Mr. Trump said via phone on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “So they’re spending a lot of money on ads, and you know, he has a lot of money from the hedge fund guys, from the special interests, from lobbyists — he raised over a hundred million dollars, so they control him totally.”

Mr. Bush’s campaign released a new spot on Tuesday that includes a collection of past statements from Mr. Trump, including praise for former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Trump’s describing himself as “very pro-choice.”

“So he really had no choice, I think … he had to go out with an ad, he did a very expensive ad and, you know, let’s see what happens. So far everybody that’s attacked me has gone down. Let’s see what happens here,” Mr. Trump said.

The spot, though, came in the form of a Web video, which likely wouldn’t have cost the campaign nearly as much as a TV ad, for example.

Mr. Trump chalked up his past political associations to his status as a businessman, saying he “got along with everybody, and it was important to do so.”

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“But now, you know, you look at Jeb and you see what he’s doing, and it’s sort of an interesting thing, and I think he had probably no choice — it’s probably [going to] now stop because it seems to be backfiring. … Based on the polls, it seems to be somewhat backfiring on Jeb,” he said.

Mr. Trump said his statement in the video that he didn’t know why he was a Republican “was at a time when the Republicans were not doing well and frankly, they had some ideas that were different from my ideas and a lot of people felt that way, and many Republicans were saying ’we have no idea why we’re a Republican.’ Republicans were not doing well.”