Via Huff Po:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush hasn’t been coy about the scars he bears from the Republican primary. He won’t be voting for his bete noire, Donald Trump, in the general election (although he’s not casting a ballot for Hillary Clinton either — protests have ideological bounds, after all).
But in one of his first interviews since leaving the race, the extent to which Bush sees the Republican Party as teetering toward irrelevance, and Trump as hastening that process, is made clearer. And it punctuates the sense of despair that is increasingly visible within certain panicky quarters of the GOP.
It’s “uncertain,” Bush told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, whether the Republican Party will survive as an institution. Bush spoke to the agency this past weekend ahead of a trip he is making to Amsterdam to deliver a lecture on democracy to the Nexus Institute on May 21. “Parties no longer stand for anything, but become a vehicle for the ambitions of their leaders,” he said. “Politics becomes a personality show.”
Like a batter tipping his hat to a pitcher who struck him out, Bush seems to reluctantly respect Trump’s ability to excel at that personality show. But there is also resentment for the media’s willingness to allow itself to be manipulated. “Trump played by a different set of rules than anyone else,” Bush says at one point. “The press basically became his partner.”