Mike Murphy: ‘I’m Proud’ Jeb and Mitt Took Trump On

‘Jeb was the first to take on Trump and I am glad he did’

KURTZ: “What was media chatter about the Republican establishment launching an assault on Donald Trump? We turn to Mike Murphy who ran Jeb Bush’s $100 billion Super PAC and he has also been an NBC commentator and Time Magazine columnist. Here’s our conversation from Los Angeles in his first television interview since the Bush campaign ended. Mike Murphy, welcome.”
MURPHY: “Good to be here Howie.”
KURTZ: “Do you think that the media have pumped up Donald Trump while being unfairly and unduly negative toward your guy, Jeb?”
MURPHY: “Well, I think Jeb got a bit of a hard treatment from the media. He had the misfortune of being the kind of quality issues experienced candidate in a year where people seem to be looking for a circus and Jeb doesn’t wear clown shoes. But, you know, on we go the voters are always right as they say and now they got to pick somebody.” 
KURTZ: “Right. But you early on dismissed Donald Trump as a zombie frontrunner using your words and said it was other people’s problems, not the Bush campaign’s problem.”
MURPHY: “Well, I called him the zombie candidate because I don’t believe he’ll ever be elected president. I think that if he could be nominated definitely he is now the delegate leader. But if nominated, I think he’ll lose in a landslide to Hillary Clinton which is one of the tragedies of Trump. But we’ll see if I’m right or wrong. He’s definitely done better in the primary than I thought. When I talk about he wasn’t our problem, I meant early in the race with so many candidates we had to concentrate on getting the regular Republicans behind us so we can face Trump later. And then it wouldn’t eventually be our problem but it wasn’t — we didn’t think our problem back in April.”
KURTZ: “And guess what, you’re not the only person who’d underestimated Trump, all the journalist and business did as well but speaking of regular Republicans, this has become a very big story with people from Romney to Ryan to you as Jeb’s guy all are piling on Trump trying to stop him, trying to slow this train down but he’s running against the establishment, doesn’t this in a way help Trump that you’re all beating him up?”
MURPHY: “Well, it’s a problem of arithmetic. I mean Jeb was the first to take on Trump but I’m proud of what he did. I’m proud of what Mitt Romney did but let’s look at the actual numbers Trump has got about 40% at best of the party that’s for him, 55 to 60 percent that opposes him. The problem is there’s so many candidates, the anti-Trump vote is getting split up. And if you were to pick one candidate who was in the strongest position to be the anti-Trump, right now, is probably Ted Cruz which is equally terrifying to the establishment. So, it’s a real pickle. I think the most qualified guy now running is probably Kasich but I’ve got some good news and bad news for him. I called my dad in Detroit who told me he’s voting for Kasich in the Michigan primary but my dad is a Democrat.” (Laughter)
KURTZ: “Oh, OK.”
MURPHY: “So, it’s hard to see a path (ph) for Kasich or Marco Rubio who’d also be a lot better than Trump.”

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