Donald Trump’s newfound commitment to message discipline and restraint showed some cracks on Thursday, with the Republican nominee attacking an African-American pastor who cut off his political speech in a Flint, Michigan, church.
"Well, I was in Flint yesterday and it was a very interesting experience and got unbelievably good treatment from people, I must say, and even in that audience, the treatment was great. But something was up because I noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me," Trump said in a telephone interview with "Fox & Friends," noting that the Bethel United Methodist Church pastor Faith Green Timmons "was so nervous, she was shaking" when she introduced him for his speech.
"I mean, everyone plays their games. It doesn't bother me,” he said about her decision to interrupt him when Trump started attacking Hillary Clinton from the front of the church.
(Trump complied with the pastor’s request to stop going after Clinton, replying, "OK. That's good. Then I'm going back onto Flint, OK?")
Trump’s slam on Green Timmons was a return to form, after the brash billionaire scorched through the Republican primary field with a steady delivery of incendiary comments about minorities, women and his GOP rivals.
Since elevating pollster Kellyanne Conway to be his campaign manager last month, Trump has been relatively restrained, generally sticking to the TelePrompTer at his speeches. He even initially refrained from delivering an “I told you so” when Clinton nearly collapsed after appearing at a 9/11 memorial service on Sunday. (Her campaign initially said she was “overheated” but later revealed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia.)
But on Wednesday night, Trump apparently couldn’t resist, and again questioned Clinton’s stamina during a rally in Canton, Ohio.
"You think this is easy? In this beautiful room that is 122 degrees," Trump said, although the arena was notably chillier than his usual venues. "It is hot and it is always hot when I perform, because the crowds are so big, these rooms were not designed for this kind of crowd.”
"I don't know folks, do you think Hillary could stand up here for an hour?" he asked.
During the two-part interview on Fox News on Thursday morning, Trump also offered an explanation about his willingness to be more transparent about his medical information to television host and doctor Mehmet Oz and more broadly, why he is talking about it in the first place.
"I did every test. I did it last week, and the samples all came back and I guess I wouldn't be talking to you right now if they were bad. If they were bad, I would say let's sort of skip this, right?" Trump said
The candidate was not asked, however, whether the same logic applied to his the release of his tax returns, for which Vice News filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS earlier this week, demanding to see all documents dating back to 2002. Trump has said that he will not release any returns while they are under audit, as all documents from 2009 onward are, according to the campaign.
Critics have speculated that he doesn't want to reveal his level of charitable giving and how he may have taken advantage of loopholes to pay a low tax rate, or no taxes at all.
Even within his familiar confines of “Fox & Friends,” Trump faced down questions about what he would do about his businesses’ ties to foreign countries. The entanglements represent a lingering issue raised anew this week by a Newsweek report Wednesday suggesting that the Trump Organization’s foreign ties could “upend U.S. national security.”
"Well I will sever connections and I'll have my children and my executives run the company," Trump said. "And I won't discuss it with them. It's just so unimportant compared to what we're doing about making America great again. I just wouldn't care. I guess you can say there's a conflict because as the company – country – gets stronger, that's good for all companies, right? But I wouldn't care. It's so unimportant compared to what I'm doing right now."
The businessman, who has repeatedly said he would place his assets in a blind trust managed by his children and executives, also said that if he were president, his companies would leave countries where sanctions were imposed.
“I wouldn't be able to be involved and then nobody else is able to, but I don't think we have too many of those companies, quite frankly," Trump said. "It's a very interesting question. I would get out. I would get out of those countries."
Campaign surrogate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended Trump’s approach the previous night on MSNBC.
“I think, listen, the father and the children have a lot of things to talk about other than the business. They have grandchildren, many of them,” Christie remarked. “He's involved in every aspect of their life and they in his. And I think that these are professional smart people who will, as we can see with his tax returns, follow the advice of their lawyers and their accountants.
When host Brian Williams remarked that experts would not necessarily characterize the trust as “blind,” Christie volunteered that he has had a blind trust in the seven years since he became governor and has no knowledge of how his investments are performing, adding that he had “absolute faith” that Trump’s children could run the business independently of their father.
“I know what it was like when I went in seven years ago but lots of things will change, and in a dynamic business like the Trump Organization, a lot of those assets will change over the course of the time he’s president,” the New Jersey governor said. “And if that wall is up and the trust is absolutely blind, he won't know how it's changed until he leaves the presidency and goes back to ask his kids what's happened over the past number of years. “
Trump's slippage in message discipline was not limited to him. Trump’s children – who also serve as some of his chief surrogates – also offered up some unhelpful headlines.
Donald Trump Jr., responding to a question about the lack of disclosure on tax returns, suggested in a meeting of Tribune-Review editors and reporters on Wednesday that the release of his father’s would be a distraction.
“Because he's got a 12,000-page tax return that would create … financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from (his father's) main message," Trump Jr. said.
That is a slightly different answer than his father’s repeated insistence that he would not release them while some are under audit from the IRS, specifically those from 2009 forward.
In a separate interview with a Philadelphia radio station Wednesday morning, Donald Trump Jr. lamented the media's treatment of his father's campaign, referencing the "gas chamber."
“The media has been her number one surrogate in this. Without the media, this wouldn’t even be a contest, but the media has built her up. They’ve let her slide on every indiscrepancy, on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing," he said. "If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”
Both Trump and Trump Jr. have made similar comments in the past, with the candidate remarking in May that he would get "the electric chair" if he had, like former Mexican President Vicente Fox, used the F-word.
And speaking to Cosmopolitan.com to promote the campaign’s new family leave plan, Ivanka Trump took issue with questioning about her father’s past comments pertaining to women.
“My father obviously has a track record of decades of employing women at every level of his company, and supporting women, and supporting them in their professional capacity, and enabling them to thrive outside of the office and within,” Ivanka Trump said. “To imply otherwise is an unfair characterization of his track record and his support of professional women.”
Pressed again on the 2004 comments in which her father called pregnancy “an inconvenience for a person that is running a business,” Trump’s eldest daughter responded, “Well, you said he made those comments. I don't know that he said those comments.”
“I think what I was — there's plenty of time for you to editorialize around this, but I think he put forth a really incredible plan that has pushed the boundaries of what anyone else is talking about,” she remarked, according to the transcript, answering another question before telling interviewer Prachi Gupta, “I’m going to jump off, I have to run, I apologize.”
