Mr. Trump said this during an interview with Bloomberg News’s Stephanie Ruhle: “When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” and Ms. Ruhle jumped in to say “”Hold on, you can’t blame George Bush for that”, to which Mr. Trump replied “”He was president, okay? Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”

Okay. If one reads the transcript (.pdf) of the August 6, 2001 of the President’s Daily Briefing, one can see the title: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” and in the body of the briefing document it reads

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

We also know what Bush’s response to this 1 1/3 page memorandum was to the CIA messenger who gave it to him, from page 2 of the preface of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine:

“All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

So, two things:

One, Trump is correct. The Twin Towers came down on George W. Bush’s watch. Moreover, Bush was aware that there was some likelihood that an attack might happen a full month before it did. He and his team did nothing to prevent it.

Two: Stephanie Ruhle is either very young or very naive or, worse for a journalist, unaware of history. How she could say Bush can’t be blamed for the disaster implies to me that she doesn’t know the facts as laid out above.

Of course, none of the national media I’ve read or seen today has bothered to go through the exercise I just did. No, most of what I saw and read was akin to “Donald Trump said another mean thing about former President Bush and his brother Jeb responded angrily.” The national press corps, it often seems, is made up of gossipy children.