Donald Trump hasn’t announced a run for president quite yet, but that isn’t stopping him from hurling stink bombs at fellow Republicans — calling Mitt Romney “a choker,” Marco Rubio “a horror show” and Jeb Bush “a nice person,” who’s still “a total fool.”
Not that he can’t stand any of them.
“I like these people,” Trump insisted of the GOP presidential lineup during a speech in Sarasota, Fla., Thursday night, as he accepted an award from a local Republican group.
“But they don’t have it.”
Trump, however, does have it — at least by his own reckoning as he thundered to 1,500 cheering fans.
Throughout his 70-minute speech, Trump boasted of his business competence, bragging, “I do it better than anybody,” according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and other reports.
But much of Trump’s time was devoted to taking hilarious pot shots at his GOP rivals-in-waiting.
Even Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee who isn’t running in 2016, got hit hard.
“Romney had one thing going for him,” Trump sniped.
“He’s good looking. Other than that, there’s nothing, Okay? Even when he walked around the stage, he walked like a penguin.”
In losing the 2012 election to President Obama — “a failed president” — Romney “choked,” Trump huffed.
“Once a choker, always a choker.”
Jeb Bush “made a total fool of himself” in waffling during recent interviews on whether his brother, George W., had been right to invade Iraq.
“How would you like him negotiating with the terrorists?” Trump chided the former Florida governor.
Rubio, the Florida senator, took heat for flubbing the same question just last weekend, despite having “the benefit of watching Jeb make a total fool out of himself” only a few days prior.
“I don’t even know how he could be running for office,” Trump said.
“We spend $2 trillion, we lost thousands of lives, we’ve got wounded warriors — who I love more than anybody — all over the place. And you can’t say if it was a bad thing?”
The only woman in the GOP race, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, was run out of her company on a rail, Trump said.
Fiorina “ran a company and she got viciously fired,” Trump said. “She was walked out of there and the stock went up seven points that day she got fired. That’s not a good sign,” he said.
“I fire people all day long. I make millions of dollars firing people on television. I know more about firing than anybody in the world . . . she got fired more viciously than anybody I’ve ever fired.”