While discussing that controversy at a rally on Tuesday, Trump said “The poor guy, you gotta see this guy”, before launching into an apparent impression of the reporter that involved flailing his arms and shaking.
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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.
And based on Trump’s movements as he mocked Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it looked to a lot of people that he was mocking Kovaleski’s disability. “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 stated: “I don’t take that back because the person was groveling in terms of creating statements”.
Trump, however, said Kovaleski must have a huge ego if he believes a man as important as him would remember a lowly journalist.
Donald Trump says he doesn’t remember the reporter whose disability he is accused of mocking, but the reporter says that they had been “on a first-name basis for years”.
On Thursday, Trump posted a statement on his Twitter account saying “I have no idea” who Kovaleski is and claiming to have “one of the all-time great memories”. This was obviously false (“you’ve got to see this guy”) but that doesn’t matter to the candidate.
Kovaleski also tweeted, “I dispute Trump’s claim in today’s NYT”.
“I didn’t know him, it’s possible, probable that I met him somewhere along the line, but I deal with reporters every day”, Trump told the crowd.
Trump, front-runner for his party’s nomination for the November 2016 election, was defending his unsubstantiated assertions that thousands of Muslims were seen in New Jersey cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers. The article doesn’t actually say that, but Trump told supporters that Kovaleski was now backing away from his original reporting.
Trump added that he thought Kovaleski’s recollections about his 2001 article “seemed like (again without knowing what he looks like) he was grovelling and searching for a way out from what he wrote many years before”. “I think they should give me an apology before they go out of business”. Trump may claim he wasn’t making fun of the journo, but is it really a coincidence that our future president mocked the reporter in a way that fit with Kovalevski’s condition?
The mockery has been termed “outrageous” by the New York Times.
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Shortly before Trump issued his denial, the Ruderman Family Foundation, which advocates for the disabled, said it was “unacceptable” to have a “presidential candidate mocking someone’s disability as part of a national political discourse”.
