Donald Trump, the property magnate and Republican presidential contender, is in trouble once again for his bombastic campaign rhetoric, this time for mocking a disabled newspaper reporter.
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Kovaleski, who covered Trump extensively while he was a reporter at The Daily News, has arthrogryposis, which limits the functioning of his joints.
He tweeted that he merely was “revealing a man grovelling to take back a statement made long ago”.
Kovaleski, who was also a reporter for the New York Daily News from 1987 to 1993, disagrees.
Trump indicated as much himself in the speech Tuesday, when he said, before he began an apparent impersonation with a series of jerking arm movements, that the article had been “written by a nice reporter”.
The controversy came about as the Republican candidate defended his claim that he witnessed thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The 2001 article by Kovaleski, who worked for the Washington Post at the time, said “a number of people” were detained and questioned for allegedly celebrating the attacks.
Trump took issue with the statement Kovaleski recently made when he said he did not remember anyone alleging the celebrations, the Associated Press reported.
However, Kovaleski, now reporter for the New York Times, claims that he and Trump have gotten together “around a dozen times” in the 1980s and were on a “first name basis” at that time.
The Times expressed outrage afterward that Trump would “ridicule the appearance of one of our reporters”.
At the rally, Mr Trump accused Mr Kovaleski of backing down from his own story. “Despite having one of the all-time great memories I certainly do not remember him”, the candidate added. “He’s going like, I don’t remember”.
“I’ve interviewed him in his office”. He even demanded an apology from the New York Times. “What I do know is that after 14 years and no retraction, this reporter tried to pull away from the tailgate party paragraph he wrote many years ago for The Washington Post”. “I don’t know if he’s J.J. Watt or Muhammad Ali in his prime – or somebody of less athletic or physical ability”, Trump said on Twitter, according to The Hill.
Although the allegations were never supported by facts, the rumors have persisted since the 9/11 attacks.
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Donald Trump denied that he mocked a reporter with a disability in a speech, despite appearing to imitate mannerisms of the “poor guy” and make fun of him.
