Donald Trump insisted on CNN this morning that he was just referring to Carly Fiorina’s personality in comments made to Rolling Stone about her face.
The exact passage from the extensive interview with the magazine:
With his blue tie loosened and slung over his shoulder, Trump sits back to digest his meal and provide a running byplay to the news. Onscreen, they’ve cut away to a spot with Scott Walker, the creaky-robot governor of Wisconsin. Praised by the anchor for his “slow but steady” style, Walker is about to respond when Trump chimes in, “Yeah, he’s slow, all right! That’s what we got already: slowwww.” His staffers at the conference table howl and hoot; their man, though, is just getting warm. When the anchor throws to Carly Fiorina for her reaction to Trump’s momentum, Trump’s expression sours in schoolboy disgust as the camera bores in on Fiorina. “Look at that face!” he cries. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”
In another part of the article, Trump further says:
Then he pivoted to Carly Fiorina. “Carly was a little nasty to me — be careful, Carly! Be careful! But I can’t say anything to her because she’s a woman. . . . I promised that I wouldn’t say that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground. I said I wouldn’t say it! That her stock value tanked. That she laid off tens of thousands of people, and she got viciously fired. I said I will not say that. And that she then went out and ran against Barbara Boxer, and . . . lost in a landslide. And I said, ‘I. Will. Not. Say. That!’ ”
Fiorina was asked about the comments last night on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, and replied, “I’m not going to spend a single cycle wondering what Donald Trump means. But maybe just maybe I’m getting under his skin a little bit because I’m climbing in the polls.”
Scott Walker tweeted this morning: “Trump’s personal attacks against @CarlyFiorina are plain inappropriate and wrong. It’s time for these shameless attacks to end.”
Jeb Bush tweeted: “Trumps demeaning remarks are small and inappropriate for anyone, much less a presidential candidate. Carly & country deserve better. Enough.”
“The statement on Carly, I’m talking about her persona. Her persona is not going to be — she’s not going to be president,” Trump told CNN this morning. “And what she’s saying about my hair, I know that’s OK and you won’t defend me.”
“Carly had a terrible time in business. She destroyed a company. You have to get the report from Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale. He’s the expert on Carly. It’s a disaster, and check out Lucent beforehand. So you have Ben saying what he said, you have Carly saying — these are two people that will not be president,” he continued.
Ben Carson was asked at a rally Wednesday how he differed from Trump. “Probably the biggest thing — I’ve realized where my success has come from and I don’t in anyway deny my faith in God,” Carson said. “My humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor and life and that’s a very big part of who I am. I don’t get that impression with him. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t get that.”
Trump said this morning that the neurosurgeon was “perhaps an OK doctor,” adding “you look at his faith and I think you’re not going to find so much.”
“All of a sudden he becomes this great religious figure. I don’t think he’s a great religious figure. I saw him yesterday quoting something and he was quoting on humility and it looked like he had just memorized it about two minutes before he made the quote. So, you know, don’t tell me about Ben Carson,” Trump said.
“…I have known Ben Carson, of him, for a long time. I never heard faith was a big thing until just recently when he started running.”
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