President-elect Donald Trump accused the “Hamilton” cast Saturday of harassing Vice president-elect Mike Pence at a performance Friday evening after the actors called on Pence to “uphold our American values.”
“Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.This should not happen!” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.
Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.This should not happen!
He followed up: “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”
The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!
Cast member Brandon Dixon, who portrays Aaron Burr and delivered the statement to Pence during a curtain call, soon replied on Twitter, “@realDonaldTrump conversation is not harassment sir. And I appreciate @mike_pence for stopping to listen.”
Pence became part of the show Friday when he attended a performance of “Hamilton” in New York and was directly addressed by the cast.
Word spread on social media that Pence was in the house for the hit Broadway show, and during the curtain call, Dixon urged Pence to “work on behalf of all of us.”
“Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us here at ‘Hamilton: An American Musical.’ We really do,” Dixon said. “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us.”
Dixon, who urged the audience not to boo Pence, said the show was performed by “a diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds and orientations.”
The crowd loudly cheered and applauded Dixon’s remarks.
Sam Rudy, a publicist for “Hamilton,” said Pence was exiting the theater at the time and stopped to listen to Dixon. Rudy described Dixon’s remarks as a “polite request” and said he can “see no way whatsoever how the cast of ‘Hamilton’ can be seen as being rude.”
“I don’t know what (Trump) qualifies as harassment,” Rudy added.
Messages left with Pence representatives were not returned.
Pence, who has been in New York to assist with Trump’s transition, was greeted inside the theater earlier in the night by a chorus of boos, though some applauded.
Unreal scene here – Mike Pence walks in and there's a massive mix of cheers and boos. pic.twitter.com/GVZ5L67mA3
Despite Trump’s harsh rebuke of the confrontation, Dixon’s rhetoric was not dissimilar to remarks Trump himself has made in the past about uniting the country.
“I’m asking America to join me in dreaming big and bold, and dream for wonderful things in our future. Let’s close the history books on the failures in Washington and let’s open a new chapter of success and prosperity for all of our people. We have a divided nation, a seriously divided nation. All of our people — that is how we will truly make American great again,” Trump said in Washington last month.
“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda is no stranger to politics, having backed Hillary Clinton during this year’s election cycle. In addition to endorsing Clinton, Miranda held a benefit showing of the musical in July, where admission to the show supported the Clinton campaign — some tickets reportedly went for as much as $10,000.
Roughly 10 hours after tweeting that the process of picking his cabinet was “very organized,” President-elect Donald Trump railed against a New York Times report that his transition team was “in a state of disarray” and U.S. allies were “struggling” to reach him.
“The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition,” Trump tweeted early Wednesday morning. “It is going so smoothly. Also, I have spoken to many foreign leaders.”
The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition. It is going so smoothly. Also, I have spoken to many foreign leaders.
According to the Times report, Trump’s transition has been “marked by firings, infighting and revelations that American allies were blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world.”
But on Twitter, the president-elect asserted he’s taken “calls from many foreign leaders,” including Russia, the U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
I have recieved and taken calls from many foreign leaders despite what the failing @nytimes said. Russia, U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan,
“I am always available to them,” Trump tweeted, suggesting that the Times is “just upset that they looked like fools” in their coverage of his candidacy and are now taking it out on him.
On Sunday, Trump similarly criticized the paper’s “very poor and highly inaccurate coverage” of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in last Tuesday’s presidential election, claiming the paper “is losing thousands of subscribers” as a result.
Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the "Trump phenomena"
A spokeswoman for the Times said Trump’s tweet was simply inaccurate.
“We’ve seen a surge in new subscriptions, both print and digital,” Eileen Murphy, senior vice president of communications for the Times, wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “And the rate of growth post-Election Day has been four times better than normal.”
He then claimed that the Times “sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me.” But the letter — sent by Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Dean Baquet to subscribers thanking them for their loyalty — did not include an apology.
The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change – doubt it?
In his interview “60 Minutes” which aired on CBS Sunday night, Trump said he’s going to be “very restrained” in his use of Twitter as commander in chief. But he said he would reserve the right to use it as a “method” to combat what he perceives as negative stories about him.
“I’m going to be very restrained, if I use it at all,” Trump said. “I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out.”
Before his latest rant against the Times on Wednesday, Trump pushed back against reports that he had requested security clearances for three of his children.
“I am not trying to get ‘top level security clearance’ for my children,” he tweeted. “This was a typically false news story.”
I am not trying to get "top level security clearance" for my children. This was a typically false news story.
But according to NBC News, Team Trump has asked that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, have top-secret clearance for the daily presidential briefing.
Donald Trump ejected a black man waving a note at him at a North Carolina rally, after accusing him of being a “thug” hired by Democrats to disrupt the event.
But C.J. Cary, the man who was thrown out, claims he is a Trump supporter and was merely trying to deliver a message to the candidate to mend ties with some key demographic groups the GOP presidential nominee has offended.
At the Wednesday campaign rally in the town of Kinston, Cary stood a few dozen feet from the stage trying to get Trump’s attention by waving a note and yelling “Donald,” the Raleigh News & Observer reported.
Trump assumed Cary was a disruptive protester.
“Were you paid $1,500 to be a thug?” Trump asked Cary, according to the Observer. The real estate mogul then asked security to remove him.
Waving a note at a rally is certainly an unusual way to get a presidential candidate’s attention. The News & Observer’s Bryan Anderson, who was at the rally on Wednesday and reported on Friday that Cary is a Trump supporter, told The Huffington Post he initially thought the man was a protester as well.
In a tweet from the rally, Anderson simply referred to him as a “protester.”
Protester escorted out of rally. Trump to protester: "Were you paid $1,500 to be a thug? Were you paid? You can get him out." pic.twitter.com/jukUj4yuBH
Shortly after the rally, however, Cary contacted Anderson to tell him his story.
Cary, an ex-Marine and resident of Nash County, not far from where Kinston is located, told the reporter that he plans to vote for Trump. He merely wanted to offer his advice that the candidate should treat certain groups of Americans with more respect. He singled out African-Americans, women, college students and people with disabilities as constituencies that deserved better treatment from the GOP nominee.
“He entirely mistook that and thought that I was a protester,” Cary said.
Trump accused Clinton of paying Democratic activists to disrupt his rallies in the third and final presidential debate on Oct. 19.
In August, Trump’s security ejected Jake Anantha, a young Indian-American supporter from a Charlotte, North Carolina, rally after assuming the local college student was there to disrupt the event. Anantha subsequently said he would no longer be voting for Trump.
During the Republican primary, when protests at Trump rallies were more common, Trump drew criticism for encouraging his supporters to hurt protesters ― something they proved all too happy to oblige. The demonstrators on the receiving end of the worst violence appear to be disproportionately people of color.
There is something especially ironic, however, in Trump immediately dismissing as a “thug” a black supporter, who was specifically trying to get Trump to be more sensitive to African-Americans. “Thug” is a particularly racially fraught term that many observers, including Seattle Seahawks star Richard Sherman, argue has become a socially acceptable way to call black men the N-word.
Trump has historically low support among African-American voters, after months of inciting ― and benefitting from ― bigotry and racism.
Although Latino immigrants and Muslims have been the biggest targets of his campaign-trail invective, Trump has a long history of anti-black racism, from his public campaign to execute the Central Park 5 in 1989 to his leading role in the birther movement questioning President Barack Obama’s eligibility for the presidency. (The Central Park 5, young men of color accused of brutally raping a woman in Central Park, have since been exonerated by DNA evidence and received multi-million-dollar settlements from the city, but Trump continues to insist on their guilt.)
Even Trump’s attempts to show he is not racist have been racially insensitive. Trump routinely stereotypes African-Americans and Latinos as impoverished “inner-city” residents, a characterization members of those communities have complained is patronizing.
Donald Trump went on the offensive against a military expert and former dean of the Army War College, Jeff McCausland, who said the Republican nominee’s comments this weekend about the battle to reclaim Mosul in Iraq show he doesn’t have a firm grasp of military strategy.
“You can tell your military expert that I’ll sit down and I’ll teach him a couple of things,” Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview.
On Sunday, Trump tweeted that the ongoing offensive against the ISIS stronghold of Mosul is turning out to be a “total disaster.”
“We gave them months of notice. U.S. is looking so dumb. VOTE TRUMP and WIN AGAIN!” he tweeted.
Trump doubled down on his assertion that the element of surprise is an important military strategy.
“I’ve been hearing about Mosul now for three months. ‘We’re going to attack. We’re going to attack.’ Meaning Iraq’s going to attack but with us. OK? We’re going to attack. Why do they have to talk about it?” he asked Stephanopoulos.
“Element of surprise. One of the reasons they wanted Mosul, they wanted to get ISIS leaders who they thought were, you know, in Mosul. Those people have all left. As soon as they heard they’re going to be attacked, they left,” Trump added. “The resistance is much greater now because they knew about the attack. Why can’t they win first and talk later?”
But according to The New York Times, some military experts disagree with Trump’s claims that the element of surprise is crucial to win the fight against ISIS.
“What this shows is Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about military strategy,” McCausland told the Times.
McCausland replied to Trump’s comments to Stephanopoulos in a lengthy statement today, saying, “I can’t wait to sit down with Mr. Trump and hear what he has to teach me about military strategy. I’m happy to compare my record of over 45 years working in national security affairs with his any time.
“When it comes to the question of the Mosul offensive, Mr. Trump doesn’t understand that 99.9 percent of the troops involved are Iraqi,” McCausland continued. “I reassert my statement to The New York Times: Mr. Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about military strategy.”
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also hit Trump for his comments to Stephanopoulos yesterday at a joint campaign event with First Lady Michelle Obama in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, today.
“And yesterday when he heard a retired army colonel and former dean of the Army War College said that Donald doesn’t understand military strategy, Trump said ‘I’ll teach him a couple of things,'” she continued. “Well, actually, Donald, you’re the one who’s got a lot to learn about the military and everything else that makes America great.”
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is on the ground in Iraq and told ABC’s Martha Raddatz in an interview earlier this week that he’s “encouraged” by the progress in the fight against ISIS because it “is going according to plan … ISIL will surely be destroyed.”
Trump blamed Clinton and President Barack Obama for the need to reclaim Mosul.
“We had Mosul. We have to take it because Hillary Clinton and Obama left that big vacuum, and ISIS went in, and they took Mosul,” he said.
With less than two weeks until the 2016 presidential election, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Donald Trump about where, and how, he’s spending his final days as a candidate.
The Republican nominee did not much care for the reporter’s inquiry.
“I think it’s a very rude question, to be honest with you,” said Trump, taking offense to Bash asking why the candidate was at a hotel ribbon-cutting in Washington, rather than campaigning in key battleground locales like Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida.
“For people who say you’re taking time out of swing states to go do this,” began Bash, referencing Trump’s appearance at the soft opening of his latest real estate jewel, Washington’s Trump International.
Cutting her off, Trump criticized not only the question, but also his opponent, the Democratic nominee: “For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting, because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then goes home and sleeps. Yet you’ll ask me that question.”
Trump has campaign stops scheduled in North Carolina for later on Wednesday, before the nation selects it’s next president on Tuesday November 8, 2016.
Vice President Joe Biden said last week that he wishes he were in high school and could take Donald Trump “behind the gym,” in a response to the groping allegations against the GOP nominee.
Trump said Tuesday that he would “love that.”
“Did you see where Biden wants to take me to the the back of the barn? Me. I’d love that,” the Republican nominee said at a rally in Tallahassee, Fla. “Mr. Tough Guy. You know, he’s Mr. Tough Guy. You know when he’s Mr. Tough Guy? When he’s standing behind a microphone by himself. … Some things in life you could really love doing.”
At a rally for Hillary Clinton in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Friday, Biden said Trump’s “disgusting assertion” that he could kiss and touch women without their consent — caught on a hot mic in a recently unearthed, explosive 2005 video — was “the textbook definition of sexual assault.”
“The press always ask me, ‘Don’t I wish I were debating him?’ No, I wish we were in high school — I could take him behind the gym,” Biden said. “That’s what I wish.”
On Monday, the 73-year-old clarified his remarks, saying he would’ve wanted to fight Trump in high school, but not now.
“If I were in high school,” Biden said. “I want to make it clear I understand what assault is. I’m not in high school. If I were in high school.”
Trump, 70, has made no such distinction with other people he’s seen as his political foes.
Earlier this year, Trump said he wanted to punch a protester who was being escorted from one of his events in the face.
“There’s a guy, totally disruptive, throwing punches — we’re not allowed to punch back anymore,” Trump said at a February rally in Las Vegas. “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher.”
He added: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
And in 2014 interviews recorded by a biographer and published by the New York Times Tuesday, the brash real estate mogul recalled his love of fighting as a child.
“I was a very rebellious kind of person,” Trump said. “I loved to fight. I always loved to fight.”
“Physical fights?” the interviewer asked.
“Yeah, all kinds of fights, physical,” he replied. “All types of fights. Any kind of fight, I loved it, including physical.”
In a span of 10 minutes, Donald Trump both blamed the media for working against him and used their reporting to bolster his attacks on Hillary Clinton during a rally here Monday.
Citing a new “front page” report from the Wall Street Journal, Trump lobbed a new attack against Clinton that included “shocking new revelations” that Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee donated money toward the campaign of Dr. Jill McGabe, the spouse of the FBI official who later oversaw the investigation into Clinton’s email server.
Both the FBI and a spokesman for the Virginia governor denied any political motive behind the donations.
“It just came out,” Trump teased, seeming to applaud the reporting. “They just figured it out.”
But all that was forgotten just a few minutes later, when Trump called the press “thieves and cooks.” Not all, he hedged, “but much of it.”
He then continued on a long-winded diatribe against the press, who he has singled out in recent weeks as one of his main campaign foes this election cycle.
“The media isn’t just against me, they’re against you,” Trump exclaimed. “That’s really what they’re against. They’re not against me, they’re against what we represent. Like Hillary Clinton, they look down on the hard working people of the country, that’s what’s happened. The media is entitled , condescending, and even contemptuous of the people who don’t share their elitist views.”
The crowd excitedly turned and booed the press, training their sights on those of us sitting amid the rows in the open-air amphitheater.
The Republican nominee promised that if elected he would be the voice of the people, a voice that would “boom through the halls of Washington” and prove that this election would be “bigger than Brexit.”
That is, of course, if Mr. Trump pulls off a win 15 days from now. The polls he once held in such high esteem and gleefully spouted from his podium during the primary have now drawn his ire and wary eye. In fact, the GOP nominee has spent much of his dwindling time on the trail disparaging polls that show him down. Of late, Trump has begun decrying the polling practice of “oversampling” calling it a tactic of voter suppression. “It’s called voter suppression,” Trump extrapolated of the goals of oversampling. “Because people will say ‘oh gee, Trump’s out.’ We’re winning, we’re winning.”
In actuality, oversampling is standard practice for pollsters and can give a deeper look into larger groups of voters.
But Trump cautioned of underestimating him, as some did during the primary process. “Remember what he said?” Trump reflected on President Obama’s nay-saying in the early part of the this year. Mocking the president, Trump mimed, “Donald Trump will never win the Republican primary, he will never do it, sorry. Sorry, he will never win. The Republicans will never do that. Well, they did that. Sorry.”
Trump’s speech – as usual – was filled with attacks for opponents. But he did come stocked with new ideas, rehashing Saturday’s Gettysburg speech where he laid out over two dozen policy plans for what the first hundred days of his administration would look like.
Amid laying out his plans, Trump lamented the state of America’s infrastructure. Concerned over the state of our bridges, Trump decided “I’m going to start swimming across rivers and lakes, I don’t want to drive.”
Later at a rally in Tampa, Trump went out of his way to defend himself against attacks linking him to Russia — but then defended Russian President Vladimir Putin against the same attacks from other politicians.
Trump promised he had “nothing to do with Russia,” and was even willing to provide a written statement on the issue.
Yet in his next breath he defended Putin against attacks from fellow American politicians. “They say such bad things about Putin,” he lamented. “And then they’re supposed to negotiate with Putin? Why would he do this?”
Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, resigned amid reports about his dealings with Russia and Ukraine.
According to Donald Trump, when journalists write articles about him, the press is “dishonest” and “out to get him,” but when they write about his rival Hillary Clinton, then they are trustworthy without a shadow of a doubt.
Donald Trump vowed Saturday to sue the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct in recent weeks.
“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” Trump said during remarks in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”
He added that a “simple phone call” to major news outlets “gets them wall-to-wall coverage with virtually no fact-checking ever.”
In the last two weeks, at least 10 women have come forward accusing Trump of inappropriately touching them. Their allegations came after a 2005 videotape surfaced of
Trump bragging about being able to grope women and get away with it.
Trump often threatens to file lawsuits without actually doing so. Earlier this month, he threatened to sue The New York Times when it published assault allegations against him, but nearly two weeks later, he has declined to follow through.
Trump went on to suggest Saturday that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was behind the women’s allegations.
“It was probably the (Democratic National Committee) and Hillary’s campaign who put forward these liars with their fabricated stories,” he said. “But we’ll probably find out later through litigation, which we’re so looking forward to.”
Asked about Trump’s claim, Clinton, speaking to reporters aboard her campaign plane Saturday night, simply said, “That’s just not accurate.”
Donald Trump regularly threatens to sue individuals who criticize him, but rarely follows through. But when he does and on the occasions that he wins he ruins that person’s life, like former Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin, who was forced to pay Trump $5 million dollars after a judgement went against her.
Lisa Bloom, who represents Jill Harth, who has accused Trump of making unwanted sexual advances on her on two separate occasions in the early 1990s, replied to Trump on Twitter Saturday afternoon.
“If Trump sues accusers we then have subpoena power to require not only Trump but all his enablers to appear for depositions. A field day,” Bloom said as part of a series of tweets.
Donald Trump on Thursday cut an interview short with an Ohio journalist after the correspondent asked him to address criticism that he’s racist and sexist.
The Republican nominee quietly thanked NBC 4’s Colleen Marshall and began to walk away while she was halfway through asking him how he feels about being “labeled a racist” and “called a sexist” so close to Election Day.
When she proceeded to probe him for his response, he said: “I am the least racist person you’ve ever met.”
Trump had been discussing an array of topics with Marshall, including his claims that the election is rigged and Republican leaders who have withdrawn their support from him, for about three minutes before she brought up the apparently sensitive issue.
If Trump can’t answer a simple question from a reporter without losing his temper, how can we expect him to react when dealing with adversarial foreign leaders?
Trump claimed he was the least racist person ever, and we might be inclined to believe him if it wasn’t for the racist things he has said over the course of his campaign.
So far we’ve cataloged over 115 instances of Trump making a racist comments or claims. Some of them include:
Donald Trump was the leader of the “birther” conspiracy theory movement, which was a racist attempt to delegitimize America’s first African-American president.
Trump retweeted the same white supremacist not once, but twice.
The Trump campaign had 3 known white supremacists as delegates to the Republican National Convention to represent Trump, William Johnson, Guy St. Onge, and Lori Gayne whose Twitter handle was “whitepride”.
Media
Looks like things got hairy at the end of this Trump local interview. He just walks away:
