When confronted, the Republican presidential frontrunner remained firm.
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“I saw it, many people saw it”, Trump insisted, “so why would I take it back?”
“I saw it. So many people saw it…”
Many of Trump’s falsehoods and exaggerations have one of two key characteristics in common: they are either lies about something that happened in the past or wildly unlikely predictions about something that will happen in the relatively distant (and therefore unknowable) future.
Trump’s campaign said last week that he would be endorsed after meeting with 100 African-American religious leaders, though it did not release the names of those expected to be in attendance.
Trump’s campaign openly promised that on Monday afternoon 100 African American faith leaders would endorse his campaign. “We’re leading in Florida against a sitting senator, right – a sitting senator”, Trump said at a rally in Sarasota, Florida, on Saturday.
Saying polls show Trump has roughly 20 percent of the backing of Republican primary voters, Kasich said “he’s got 80 percent of Republicans who don’t support him”.
Bishop Paul S. Morton tweeted Friday that he refused to meet with Trump, calling the candidate disrespectful.
“I would never mock a person that has a disability”, Trump said.
When his remarks were revisited as an issue on NBC, he said: “All over the world – forget about New Jersey for a second – all over the world, it was reported that Muslims were celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center”.
“I was told it was an endorsement”, Trump said today of the meeting on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.
Political scientist John Sides has written several times about how the media have covered Trump far more extensively than other candidates, and demonstrated the close correlation between his poll numbers and his ratio of mentions in media stories.
Bishop George Bloomer, who traveled to the gathering from North Carolina, said he arrived in NY with concerns about “the racial comments that have been made and the insensitive comments that have been made”, including an incident earlier this month in which a black protester was roughed up by Trump supporters at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama. Last weekend, Trump also shared an image containing false statistics about black-on-white violence.
And when NBC’s Chuck Todd challenged his inaccuracies on, “Meet The Press”, Trump replied: “Take it easy, Chuck”.
And some attendees emerged expressing full-throated support for Trump.
NEW YORK (AP) Donald Trump says he thinks a group of black pastors meeting with him Monday had planned to endorse him for president but were pressured out of it because he “believes all lives matter”.
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CHUCK TODD: People were saying, people were saying.
