Politico
By Ben Schreckinger
September 23, 2015
Donald Trump is a uniter, not a divider, he said on Wednesday.
He
had just trashed Marco Rubio, whose stock has been rising following Jeb
Bush’s less-than-stellar performance in last week’s debate and Scott
Walker’s Monday withdrawal from the race.
The
official purpose of Tuesday night’s event, a town hall hosted by Sen.
Tim Scott, was to give South Carolinians the chance to question the
candidate. But Trump used the occasion to talk up his appeal to
non-whites. He can unify a divided country, he said, because “I have a
temperament where I bring people together.”
Asked
by Scott, the first black Republican elected to the Senate from the
South in more than a century, to address criticisms of his racially
charged rhetoric, Trump responded, “My relationship with
African-American people and businesses has been fantastic.” Trump waved a
piece of paper in his hand and cited a recent poll from Survey USA
whose questionable results show him getting 25 percent of
the black vote against Hillary Clinton in a general election.
The
claim prompted Scott to jump out of his seat, grab the paper from Trump
and put on an exaggerated show of scrutinizing it before giving
a nod of satisfaction.
Trump
also said he had a “great relationship with Hispanics,” despite his
inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants, because they’re
sympathetic
to his immigration message. “They don’t want people flooding the
country,” he said.
“It
was fantastic today,” Trump said referring to an event earlier on
Wednesday with the South Carolina African-American Chamber of Commerce
in Charleston, where some seats remained empty. The 2,000-seat venue in
Columbia was full and took about three weeks to sell out, according to a
Scott aide.
Earlier
in the day, Trump announced that he was temporarily putting Fox News in
the penalty box, tweeting “.@FoxNews has been treating me very
unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won't be doing any more
Fox shows for the foreseeable future.” By Wednesday evening, however, he
said of a return to the network, “I’m sure at some point it will
happen.”
But in Columbia, it was Trump’s broadsides against Rubio that turned heads.
He
twice knocked the Florida senator’s spotty attendance record and called
him a “lightweight” — a dig he’s also aimed at Rand Paul and Bobby
Jindal — in pushing back against Rubio’s criticism that Trump has not
delved into foreign policy specifics. (“You don’t want the enemy to hear
what you’re doing,” Trump explained.)
Trump
has been ramping up his attacks on Rubio in recent days. On Tuesday he
tweeted, “Senator Marco ‘amnesty’ Rubio, who has worst voting record
in Senate, just hit me on national security-but I said don't go into
Iraq. VISION.”
At
the event earlier Wednesday in Charleston, he said of Rubio, “He's
overly ambitious, too young — and I have better hair than he does,
right?”
He
also said, “I’ve never seen a young guy sweat that much. He’s drinking
water, water, water. I never saw anything like this with him with
the water.”
At
a press availability before the town hall, Trump was more measured in
his criticism of Carly Fiorina, who also traveled to South Carolina
on Wednesday, calling her a “nice woman” while also disparaging her
record as a corporate executive. Fiorina has surged in polls in recent
days after clashing with Trump on the debate stage at the Reagan
Library, but few see her as a serious contender for
the nomination, unlike Rubio.
“I
do think she has had a terrible history with Hewlett Packard and
Lucent, and I think that’s going to be very hard to overcome,” he said.
But
mostly, Trump roamed from topic to topic, mashing up his answers to
Scott's questions with his usual stump speech and whatever seemed to
be on his mind.
He
went on the record about labor policy, saying, “Got to have right to
work” and crediting business-friendly laws for South Carolina’s
attractiveness
to large employers like Boeing, which operates a plant in North
Charleston.
He
also weighed in on cyber security, saying, “The Internet does cause
problems because people are finding things out about us that they never
knew before … The government is going after the St. Louis Cardinals for
hacking the Houston Astros baseball team. Can you believe this?”
Supporter
Chad Hatley, a 46-year-old attorney, said he saw a softer side of Trump
at the event. “He comes off better in person than he does
on TV. He’s more relatabale. Less brash.”
A
new Fox News national poll released Wednesday evening showed Trump
still on top – at least for now. The poll found him with 26 percent
support,
up a percentage point since Aug. 6, with retired neurosurgeon Ben
Carson gaining on him with 18 percent and Fiorina also edging up with 9
percent.
Before
the town hall, Trump entertained the possibility that — like Rick Perry
in 2012 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008 — he would fall out of first
place. “Maybe something happens,” he said. “I don’t think it will.”
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