A wide swath of Republican presidential candidates rushed to defend Fox News host Megyn Kelly after real-estate magnate Donald Trump unleashed a storm of criticism against her.
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At the same time, some critics have pointed to crude or sexist statements Erickson himself has made over the years, suggesting a certain amount of hypocrisy in the decision to boot Trump.
The conservative forum went on without him Saturday, but Trump remained the dominant topic as leading Republicans, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, swept into Atlanta to woo activists convened by RedSate blog editor Erick Erickson. But I just don’t want someone on stage who gets a hostile question from a lady and his first inclination is to imply it was hormonal.
In a statement on his Twitter feed, Trump said he meant that blood was coming from Kelly’s nose, but Erickson and others believed it was a reference to menstruation.
WERTHEIMER: Donald Trump, I think – you know, he says that this works for him because he is non-PC, and people are exhausted of PC – political correctness.
Ms Kelly challenged him on remarks he made about women during a TV debate.
“I am a sinner like everyone else and have said some really dumb, stupid things in my life and had to apologize for them“, Erickson told host Linda Wertheimer.
Friday night, the Republican Party’s only female candidate, Carly Fiorina, tweeted her comments in the aftermath of Trump’s falling out.
An angry Trump branded her questions “ridiculous” and “off-base” and later told broadcaster CNN: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes”.
She later added “I stand with @megynkelly“. “Certainly I don’t have a lot of respect for Megyn Kelly“.
In America, states that generally vote Republican are commonly referred to as “red states”.
The Megyn Kelly controversy has also caused some upheaval within the Trump camp itself, with Trump announcing on Saturday afternoon that he had fired his top campaign adviser, Roger Stone.
The departure comes amid furious damage control, as Trump seeks to nuance his latest headline-grabbing remark. “Blood coming out of her wherever”, Trump said during a subsequent interview with CNN Friday.
“This is my event, that I’m paying for and I can do whatever I want”, he said. Some conservative women at the very event he was banned from aren’t buying it. I found his comments to be degrading and unpresidential. If you’re a candidate for president, I think there are certain lines that you just can’t cross. As being uninvited to the GOP gathering, he later tweeted, “Political correctness is killing our country”. “We’ll new be doing another campaign stop at another location”, the spokesman’s statement said. Stone, however, said that he had quit the campaign, citing the Kelly controversy as a “diversion”.
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An exasperated Mike Huckabee had enough of the seemingly endless Trump questions.
