Jeb who ?

                                       

Sources in the Trump camp say they will soon launch a major ad blitz that could cost at least $2 million a week, and possibly several times that.

The initial wave of ads will focus on Trump’s vision and his stance on key issues—no bio spots necessary for the celebrity candidate—but that could change if any GOP rivals target him with negative commercials. “If you attack Trump, he will attack you 10 times as hard,” an adviser says. “We will not allow any attack to go unanswered.”

The Trump camp is working with a Florida-based advertising firm, as widely reported, but also with several other media companies, some of which are well-known in the political community, the sources say.

Their advantage, in Iowa, New Hampshire and beyond, is that the bombastic billionaire can just write a check for the TV campaign. Some pundits have expressed skepticism that Trump really wants to dig deeply into his personal fortune, but these sources insist he is ready to do just that—perhaps as much as $100 million for advertising overall. “Our Super PAC,” says the adviser, “is Donald Trump’s bank account.”

The original plan was to saturate the airwaves so that the real estate mogul could define himself before his GOP rivals did it for him. But Trump says he had no need to do that because he generated such saturation coverage, all of it free.

If Trump pours big bucks into an ad campaign—and no budget has been set—he could again confound the prognosticators. While Trump enjoys a 20-point lead in national polls and dominates many state polls, he and Ted Cruz have been trading the lead in Iowa, where a win could give the Texas senator momentum and let some air out of the Trump invincibility balloon. A Gravis poll just before Christmas had Trump and Cruz tied in Iowa at 31 percent.

Trump himself tweeted over the weekend, “The same people that said I wouldn't run, or that I wouldn't lead or do well (1st place and leading by 21%), now say I won't beat Hillary.”

Still, the polls suggest that Trump could have a tough time, especially with Hillary Clinton holding a built-in Electoral College advantage against any Republican challenger.

  Barbara Bush's response to the Trump campaign.

P.S. Thinking of epic William Buckley today due to all of this cheap shot phony nonsense...