Donald Trump told CNN this morning that he has to keep the option to run as an independent on the table “because if something happens where I’m not treated fairly, I may very well use that door.”
Trump said the assumption that he was taking digs at Megyn Kelly for somehow being hormonal was a “ridiculous interpretation” and called Red State’s Erick Erickson, who disinvited Trump from last weekend’s conservative confab because of the billionaire’s “blood coming out of her wherever” comment, “a guy who’s got a very checkered past and lots of checkered stupid statements.”
He added that Jeb Bush needs to apologize to women for last week’s comment in which Bush said “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”
“He made a terrible statement about women’s health issues. It was a foolish statement, perhaps a stupid statement. It’s a statement that should never have come up and should never have been made and I was shocked that he made it. I think that will prove to be his 47 percent,” Trump said, referencing the infamous Mitt Romney remark.
Bush said later that he misspoke. “That’s an awfully big issue to misspeak,” Trump said. “I will be so good to women. I cherish women. I will work hard to protect women.”
Trump said “the biggest problem” he has with Planned Parenthood “is the abortion situation.”
“It’s like an abortion factory. You can’t have it and you shouldn’t be funding it and that should not be funded by the government. I feel strongly about that. That’s my biggest problem with Planned Parenthood because it really — if you look at it and you look at the work they do, it really has become so heavily centered on abortion. You can’t have that,” he said. “…I would look at the individual things that they do and maybe some of the things are good, and maybe — I know a lot of the things are bad. But certainly the abortion aspect of it should not be funded by government.”
“But we have to take care of women. We have to absolutely take care of women,” he said, adding that he favors abortion exceptions for rape, incest, the “health of the mother and life of the mother.”
Asked if he’d support equal pay legislation for women, Trump replied, “I’m looking into that very strongly.”
“The concept of it, I love. I just don’t want it to be a negative where everybody ends up making the same pay. Because that’s not our system,” he said. “…I mean, I have women that get paid a lot of money and I pay them more. And I’m very proud to pay them more.”
Trump later added, “Nobody knows politics better than I do.”
“…I am the most fabulous whiner. I do whine because I want to win. And I’m not happy if I’m not winning.”
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