Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin's praise of rival Donald Trump and slammed the GOP front-runner as a "bully" who is running a campaign that is "high volume" with "lots of talk, but nothing specific."
"I don't respect Vladimir Putin," the former Florida governor told John Berman
on CNN via Skype from El Paso, Texas. "To get praise from Vladimir Putin is not going to help Donald Trump. He's not a serious candidate.
"He would bring chaos to the presidency as he's done to the campaign," Bush added. "It's entertaining.
"The fact is we're at war right now with Islamic terrorism, and he's not offered one compelling thing that he would do to keep us safe.
"We're never going to beat Hillary Clinton with grandiosity, without anything to back it up."
In Moscow Thursday,
Putin called Trump "a very colorful character and talented" after his annual news conference with reporters. "He's the absolute leader in the presidential race."
Trump told ABC News that "it is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond."
Bush, who has fallen to fifth place in recent national polls, continued his attacks on Trump that began during the fifth Republican debate on Tuesday in Las Vegas.
In response to reports that Bush campaign officials were investigating whether the candidate could break the Republican Party pledge and
not support Trump if he were the nominee, he said, "I didn't know they were doing this.
"That's a smart thing to do: Determine exactly what the consequences are for making that kind of decision.
"Look, my intention is to win the nomination," Bush told Berman.
He later explained that his campaign was studying the possibility as it "related to [Trump's] threats to leave."
Trump said during the debate that he would support the eventual GOP nominee.
"This guy is not going to win the nomination," Bush said. "That's the basic point."
The former governor also refused, after Berman asked five times, to say whether Trump would make a better president than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
"My point is that he's not qualified to be commander-in-chief of the United States of America," Bush finally said. "He's had a chance to bone up. God willing, he'll start to do it.
"It looks like it's all about him, not about creating strategies to keep us safe. The world right now has been turned asunder, turned upside down because of lack of strong leadership.
"We don't need another version of that."
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