Trump goes off on Clinton’s email, Obama’s plane, Saddam Hussein, and just about everything else.
Donald Trump was everything Tuesday night. Everything but brief.
Speaking to a boisterous crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, Trump used a large chunk of his time to make extended hay over the latest turn in Hillary Clinton’s email saga - Tuesday’s news that she wouldn’t face a recommendation of federal charges from the FBI but that she had been, in the words of FBI Director James Comey, part of an “extremely careless” system for handling classified information while serving as Secretary of State.
Trump’s takeaway line on Clinton: “She can’t keep her emails safe, and she can’t keep our country safe.”
Trump went on to rail against the FBI for not pressing charges against Clinton, saying it was proof of a “rigged” system. (Trump felt so much ownership of the issue that he even claimed to have introduced the word “rigged” into American political vernacular.) He also suggested Clinton’s talk of keeping Attorney General Loretta Lynch in her administration was tantamount of a Clinton “bribe” to let her off the hook.
Trump also launched into an extended riff speculating on the conversation that took place between Lynch and former President Bill Clinton when the two met last week, including a minute-by-minute accounting of what they might discuss before, he suggested, they discuss.
Trump also found time for tangents.
He talked, at length, about the war in Iraq, claiming he’d always been against it and knew it would destabilize the Middle East - a line of argument that Trump detoured to discuss the merits of Saddam Hussein. "Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, right? He was a bad guy, a really bad guy," Trump said. "But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists."
His belief that President Barack Obama uses the term “ISIL” instead of “ISIS” simply to be contrarian and upset people also found its way into that section, as did Trump’s claim that Iraq is now “Harvard for terrorists.”
At another point, he contradicted himself on the need for Republican Party unity in the space of a single breath. “We need real unity and the leaders have to get supportive and if they don’t get supportive, we’re going to win anyway. Don’t worry about it. In fact, probably I do better without the kind of support that I’m talking about because that’s why I’m here in the first place,” he said.
Other topics explored included: Obama’s carbon footprint for flying in an “old” plane (Air Force One), Trump’s ability to phone into televisions shows, Obama’s golf schedule and proof that Trump did indeed have real hair.
Near the end of his speech, Trump, smiling broadly, entertained the crowd with the readout of a hypothetical future phone call with him, the governor and lieutenant governor of North Carolina - state leaders whom he singled out for extensive praise over the course of his remarks.
In this call, the state leaders would beg Trump to stop all of America’s “winning” because North Carolina residents were so sick of it. In response, Trump said he would have to decline, regretfully informing the pair that he would keep America on its winning ways.
But time and time again, Trump veered back towards Clinton, her emails, and his quest to overthrow a corrupt, inept elite. He pulled no punches, suggesting that Clinton’s reported consideration of another four years of Lynch as attorney general amounted to bribery.
“She said today that, ‘We may consider the attorney general to go forward.’ That’s like a bribe, isn’t it? Isn’t that sort of a bribe? I think it’s a bribe,” Trump said. “I mean that if she wins she’s going to consider extending the attorney general. I’m not knocking the attorney general. What I’m saying is, ‘How can you say that?’”
Trump also compared Clinton’s actions to one of the most notorious corporate frauds in American history. “She went to extraordinary lengths to carry out an Enron-style purge of her emails,” he said.
And he claimed Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s chief opponent in the Democratic primary, must have been stung by the news because he’d just lost the “FBI primary.” (Sanders himself had only occasionally touched on Clinton’s emails, more frequently dismissing them as a distraction.)
The New York billionaire read from a statement his campaign issued earlier today, and repeatedly insisted that Obama - who campaigned with Clinton for the first time on Tuesday - knew in advance that the former secretary of state would be cleared and when.
Trump added the Raleigh stop to its schedule after the Obama-Clinton joint appearance in Charlotte was announced, and he proceeded to pan their 2016 debut. “I watched him today. It’s like a carnival act. A lot of fun,” Trump said of the president, waving his arms in a dancing motion. “Moving around, he has a whole thing. You know, great great, great. I’m saying, ‘this is a president?”
He also panned Clinton’s performance. “Her speech was terrible. I watched it. How boring was that speech?” he said.
Trump’s campaign spent the day messaging off of the non-indictment. “Imagine what would happen in your life if you did one one-thousandth of the things Hillary Clinton did,” said senior policy adviser Stephen Miller during introductory remarks in Raleigh. He attributed Clinton’s email habits - characterized as “reckless” by Comey - as the sign of to a desire to cover up corruption.
“If the public could ever see what she was doing in the light of day her career would be over,” Miller said, minutes before Trump appeared and pulled a flustered Bob Corker on stage to offer brief remarks praising the candidate.
Trump’s campaign sent a late-afternoon fundraising email off of the news, and the candidate taped an interview with Bill O’Reilly in which he called Comey’s announcement only a “semi-exoneration,” because of the harsh terms in which the FBI director condemned Clinton’s actions.
source