How Jeb Bush was swallowed by his past

Jeb Bush started his presidential campaign strongly, laughing at Donald Trump’s entry into the race. But he is the latest to fall in the billionaire’s wake, writes Michael C Bender.

At a Jeb Bush staff meeting in the conference room of a Phoenix hotel in May, a text message popped into the phone of his senior adviser and long-time confidante Sally Bradshaw that sent aides scrambling for the television: “He said it.”

It had been four days since Bush and his team rehearsed how to extinguish the political firestorm he’d ignited by saying, astonishingly, that he would have agreed with then-president George W Bush to invade Iraq in 2003 even if — and this was the killer — he’d known the intelligence was faulty.