Flanked by “The Apprentice” victor Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, Donald Trump on Monday announced he had been endorsed by “some” but not all of the 100 or more black pastors he had originally claimed would endorse him for president.
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He says Trump’s campaign thought the press conference scheduled Monday in NY was for an endorsement when it wasn’t.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email that Trump would still be holding a private meeting with the group on Monday before departing for a rally in Georgia.
Initially, Trump’s campaign had said he already locked up the religious leaders’ backing.
“We’re deeply disturbed by the lack of empathy that he seems to show”, one participant who was invited by Scott said before the meeting.
Mr. Trump cancelled a planned press event where a coalition of black pastors and religious leaders were supposed to endorse him, with a group of black leaders opposing the event and some of the attendees claimed they never promised an endorsement.
When his remarks were revisited on NBC, Trump 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”.
But as Kasich struggled to gain traction in the early presidential contests of Iowa and New Hampshire while Trump has maintained a strong lead in the polls, Kasich and his advisers have sharpened their attacks against the NY billionaire.
“So, why would I take it back?”
“I saw it on television”.
Trump supporters are more likely than other Republican voters to want to deport undocumented immigrants, making Trump fans the most extreme of even the hardline GOP voting cohort when it comes to this issue of deportation. “I’ve had hundreds of people call in and tweet in on Twitter, saying they saw it and I was 100 percent right”.
But the Republican front-runner stuck to his guns: “I saw it on television”.
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 also said he supported the idea of requiring all Muslims living in the United States to register in a special database as a counter-terrorism measure.
New Jersey officials and journalists – including the authors of a paragraph that Trump cited – have found no basis in fact for his assertion.
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“I have great doubts about Donald Trump’s ability to be commander in chief”, Bush said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”. “I respectively (Sic.) declined as I do not support nor will endorse Donald Trump”.
