If we sat around, adding up all of the stupid things Donald Trump has said, we’d be here for hours and hours going over it and that would just be over what he said the previous month. Not content with his usual bombast, Trump decided to go full stupid and attack George W. Bush over 9/11, essentially assigning him blame merely because he was in office at the time of the attacks. In an interview with Bloomberg Television. Trump didn’t need much prompting to open his mouth and insert his foot:

The controversy began Friday when Bloomberg Television released an interview with Trump in which the billionaire businessman said he was more competent than the former president.

“When you talk about George Bush, I mean — say what you want — the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump said.

Bloomberg’s Stephanie Ruhle then interrupted and said Trump couldn’t blame Bush for the attacks that left nearly 3,000 Americans dead.

“He was president, okay?” Trump responded. “Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”

No sooner had he said it and started to be criticized for it, did his yapping minions come out and start to defend him. “Well, he’s factually correct. Bush was in office during the 9/11 attacks!” Naturally, Trump also had left wing Democrats defending him. These are the same people who say Bush was fully to blame for 9/11 after being in office for about seven months while claiming Obama is not to blame for his lousy Presidency, despite being seven years in.

The notion Trump was merely pointing out a “fact” is absurd on its face. Everybody knows who was President when 9/11 happened. It doesn’t bear repeating. No, what Trump did was elevate a theory that is not exactly Trutherism, but just a lighter version of it. It’s often referring to as “soft Trutherism.”

Trutherism is the nutball theory the 9/11 attacks were actually carried out by the US government and President Bush was part of the conspiracy to carry them out and part of the cover up.  Trump’s “soft” version says President Bush was well aware of the danger, did not connect the dots and therefore, “allowed” the attacks to take place. Karol Markowicz wrote about this kind of “soft” trutherism a day after the anniversary of the attacks:

It’s much easier to continue hating George W. Bush — to focus on bogus charges that he sat back and did nothing while his country was attacked — than it is to understand nameless, faceless people who still want us dead today.

Both types of truthers want something else to be the reality. They want someone safe to blame, someone who didn’t chop off Daniel Pearl’s head and doesn’t blow himself up to advance a cause we find bizarre.

The government, and the Bush administration specifically, is that safe target. Better to insist that the Bushies just screwed up than to acknowledge that we remain under threat, that (even with those restrictions on cooperation removed) our government may not be able to stop some future attack.

And what of Trump? The man who “fights” didn’t seem to want to discuss the issue:

Donald Trump, under fire for suggesting that George W. Bush shared in the blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks because they happened during his presidency, repeatedly declined to engage with reporters about the matter Friday night — opting instead to continue a long-running feud with Jeb Bush on Twitter afterwards.

Trump regularly speaks with reporters at campaign events and often takes multiple questions in an impromptu manner, making his silence Friday all the more noticeable.

When asked by CNN after a rally at a local high school here if he thought the attacks were George W. Bush’s fault, Trump, after pausing to listen to the question, walked away.

Of course he went and had a little feud on Twitter. It’s a safe haven for him where he can bask in the glow of the compliments his nitwit slobbering fans will bestow upon him at every turn.

In the meantime, Hillary Clinton sits back and cackles the entire time as Trump continues to turn the GOP primary season into a freak show. Democrats don’t have to do much work because Trump is busy attacking Republicans for them. Now he’s latched on to the goofy theory that Bush could have stopped the 9/11 attacks and didn’t.

What kind of Republican does that?