Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush praised Sen. Ted Cruz’s selecting Carly Fiorina as his running mate as a “smart move” and said he doesn’t know which Donald Trump to believe in the wake of the GOP front-runner’s formal foreign policy speech in D.C. Wednesday.
“She takes on Trump really well, I think, and she takes on Hillary Clinton very well as well,” Mr. Bush said of Mrs. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who ended her own presidential bid in February. “Someone who’s got a proven record and who’s been vetted as a candidate, I thought was a smart move by Ted Cruz.”
Mr. Bush suspended his 2016 campaign after a disappointing finish in South Carolina in February, and endorsed Mr. Cruz for president last month.
The former governor, who frequently tangled with Mr. Trump while he was still running for president, said in the interview with CNN released Thursday that he doesn’t think the billionaire businessman is a “serious person.”
“I don’t know which Donald Trump to believe,” Mr. Bush said. “The one that read from a teleprompter a speech that was inside the lines, or the one that wants to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, or a 45 percent tariff on China, or abandoning NATO, or saying [it] would be a smart thing to have Japan and Korea kind of go it alone and build their nuclear capability to deal with China.
“Which Donald Trump is the one that’s expressing these views? There’s two of ’em,” he said. “I think we need a president with a steady hand.
“The idea that a president should be unpredictable is not really the way history has been written,” he said. “The successful presidents have been clear about their vision, have laid out the agenda [on] foreign policy, and our friends know that we have their back and our enemies fear us and there’s a constancy by American leadership.
“He’s proposing the exact opposite, and I don’t think that’s a serious approach,” Mr. Bush said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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