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Trump campaigns in South Carolina, speaking to black business leaders and

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump lashed out at rivals and complained about mistreatment by the media on Wednesday, apparently stung by a rash of criticism about his comments on immigration and women. It isn’t like the opposite GOP candidates notably like one another, Trump groused.

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And he did so in a convention centre ballroom in which about a third of the seats were unfilled.

North Charleston, where Trump spoke Wednesday, saw protests this year after a white policeman shot a black man who ran away after a traffic stop. He used a news conference before the forum to continue a recently renewed feud with Fox News, mock a conservative group that is airing attack ads against him and complain to an NBC reporter that the network is citing a CNN poll that shows Fiorina gaining support rather than their own survey, which shows Trump holding a larger lead. “The American dream is dead, but we’re going to make it bigger and better and stronger than ever before”, he said, criticizing the media for failing to report the second clause of that sentence.

Earlier, at a session in North Charleston, Trump said Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “hate each other, but they can’t say it”.

He has said his ideas for job creation will help him win minority voters, including African-Americans. “The press is very dishonest”.

The candidate made a handful of big promises: “We can get rid of probably 75% of the regulations”, Trump suggested.

He addressed a crowd of more than 2,200 people at the Koger Performing Arts Center on the University of South Carolina’s campus. And with just over 500 attendees, it was considerably smaller than the 1,500 RSVPs the campaign told msnbc they’d received.

Pleshette Grant of North Charleston, a nurse who has a side business providing nail care for the elderly, said she has read Trump’s books and has followed his economic advice so closely that she calls him her “Uncle Trump”.

“Carly is out there fighting to raise money”, he said. And Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton is “shrill”, he said at another, adding that her campaign “is coming down like a really, really sick rocket”.

Nevertheless, Malyerck said Trump remains the Palmetto State juggernaut. That room was hot.

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Trump repeated his assertion Wednesday that Clinton, during the 2008 presidential campaign, started the discredited “birther” movement whose members falsely claim that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. There’s been no evidence tracing the charge to Clinton or her campaign. “That was a new one to me”.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves a campaign event in Columbia South Carolina