Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he had “no choice” but to mention former President Bill Clinton when responding to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s sexism attack, adding that Hillary Clinton does not want to face him in the general election.
Trump recently said Clinton was “schlonged” in the 2008 Democratic primary when she lost the nomination to Barack Obama. Clinton refused to respond directly to Trump but said, “It’s not the first time he’s demonstrated a penchant for sexism.”
Trump later tweeted, “Hillary Clinton has announced that she is letting her husband out to campaign but HE’S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate!”
He stepped up criticism of Clinton’s comments today at a Hilton Head, S.C., rally.
“Nobody respects women more than Donald Trump, that I can tell you, and when she said that I had no choice because I didn’t start it. I had no choice and I did have to mention her husband’s situation, OK? And that is now the biggest story on television by a factor of 10. We have to do it. You can’t let people push you around. You can’t let people tell lies,” Trump said.
Trump told the audience he loves the idea of having a women president but it cannot be Clinton.
“It can’t be her. She’s horrible, and I’ll tell you who does not like – yeah, we’ll get Ivanka [Trump],” Trump said, responding to shouts from the crowd. “But I’ll tell you who doesn’t like Hillary, women don’t like Hillary, I see it all the time and always so theatrical – ‘Mr. Trump said this and that and this.’ I shouldn’t do it – I just have to turn off the television so many times. [Hillary] just gives me a headache, although I think last night I gave her a big headache – I can imagine those discussions,” he said.
“She came out with the sexism, which is such nonsense, but she’s playing that card and then I had to hit her back. So I hit her back and I talked about her husband and the abuse of women – the tremendous abuse, no, it’s tremendous abuse. Now today the television goes crazy and she gets up and makes a speech and doesn’t even mention anything about me with sexism or anything else – I wonder why,” he added.
Trump referred to his most recent interview with NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd.
“He goes, ‘The Clinton campaign said they would most like to run against Trump,’ like I’m some kind of sap. So I call him, I say, Chuck, let me explain something to you. When they say they want to run against me that means they don’t want to run against me. Do you understand that? It’s reverse psychology,” Trump said.
“They don’t want to run against Trump. The last thing she wants in her whole life – I did this in like 15 minutes, what happened to them, because the husband wants to come and she wants to accuse me of things and the husband is one of the great abusers of the world? Give me a break. Give me a break. So the last person she wants to run against is me.”
Trump said the GOP candidates who have dropped out of the race all had directly attacked him.
“Wouldn’t that be nice if our country could have that same thing? You attack and they are, ‘boom, gone’ and if we could do it verbally that’s even better. You know, who wants to use our military?” he said.
Trump also criticized Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), saying he wants to raise taxes to 90 percent.
“You’ll have to move out — I love this area by the way, I’ve been here many times. Great golfing area, right? We love it,” he said at the rally. “No more golf. You won’t have any golf any more. You won’t have any money left to be golfing.”
Sanders shot back in a statement, calling Trump a “pathological liar” who “lies, lies and lies again.”
“What is true is that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality billionaires like Trump should pay their fair share of taxes,” Sanders said. “Unlike Trump, who wants to give huge tax breaks to his fellow billionaires and large multi-national corporations, what we need is real tax reform which asks the very wealthiest people in this country and large, profitable corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes.”
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