Just a day after Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said he would probably no longer be talking about rival candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the billionaire real estate mogul mocked Bush for consulting with his parents over the weekend about his disastrous campaign.
"Bush is out there, his campaign is a disaster," Trump told a crowd in Atkinson, New Hampshire Monday morning, according to The Washington Examiner. "That's because I came along! I'm proud of it."
Bush's dwindling poll numbers contributed to his decision to enact across-the-board pay cuts at his Miami campaign headquarters this week. Payroll costs will be reduced by 40 percent, salaries will be cut for all but the most entry level staff members, travel costs will be cut by 20 percent, and staff will also be relocated to other states, according to an internal memo reported on by The New York Times.
Since Trump entered the race in June, Bush has consistently fallen in the polls, currently sitting in fifth place with 7.2 percent support in RealClearPolitics' average of polling data, down from first place with 22 percent four months ago.
To assess where Bush's candidacy stands in the face of such large-scale cutbacks and drooping poll numbers, Bush's father, former President George H. W. Bush, called a finance meeting over the weekend in Houston, which was also attended by Bush's brother, former President George W. Bush, according to CBS News.
"So he's meeting now with mom and dad," Trump told the crowd Monday. "No it's true, he needs counsel."
Trump also caught wind of Bush's speech given at a town hall in South Carolina on Saturday, where at one point, Bush sounded ready to concede to to Trump.
"If this election is about how we're going to fight to get nothing done, then I don't want anything, I don't want any part of it," Bush said in Charleston. "I don't want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I've got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that."
Trump responded on Monday by saying, "He was very angry over the week. If he doesn't like my tone, how's he going to deal with Putin? How's he going to deal with these killers in the Middle East?"
