With a retweet, immigration hardliner Donald Trump let his followers know on the Fourth of July that fellow Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush “has to like Mexican illegals because of his wife.”
Busted. Donald Trump deleted this tweet attacking Jeb Bush over his Mexican wife: pic.twitter.com/nD95099uGQ
— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) July 6, 2015
The real estate mogul shared the tweet from one of his followers, a habit that’s gotten him in trouble before. It appeared to be live on Twitter for a full day before it was deleted, according to Hollywood news site TheWrap.
The timing of the retweet was notable in that the real estate mogul admitted earlier Saturday that he was taken aback by the “severe” reaction from the business community to his comments on Mexican immigrants, whom he’d labelled “rapists” in his presidential announcement speech.
“They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” Trump said during that speech, referring to immigrants crossing the border from Mexico. “And some, I assume, are good people.”
Bush, the former governor of Florida, is married to Columba Bush, who was born in Mexico. The fluent Spanish speaker told The New York Times over the weekend that he took Trump’s comments on Mexican immigrants “personally.”
“To make these extraordinarily ugly kind of comments is not reflective of the Republican Party … He’s doing this to inflame and incite and to draw attention, which seems to be the organizing principle of his campaign,” Bush added.
