Proven wrong about his campaign manager’s treatment of a reporter, Trump used the incident to tighten his bond with his supporters.
By Eli Stokols and Ben Schreckinger
JANESVILLE, Wisc. — The facts are no match for Donald Trump.
Trump, who is already viewed “very unfavorably” by half of the country’s women, refused to criticize or discipline his campaign manager after he was charged Tuesday with battery for grabbing a female reporter.
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Rather, Trump defended him — and blamed the reporter for causing the altercation, which was captured by surveillance at Trump’s Florida estate where it occurred earlier this month, and then embellishing her story by accusing Corey Lewandowski of throwing her down.
“Did anybody see the tapes?” Trump asked the 1,000 supporters crammed into a hotel ballroom here Tuesday afternoon. “What did you think?”
“Nothing!” several people shouted.
The video did show something. It showed Lewandowski, who called Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields “delusional” for claiming he grabbed her, doing just that. It also cut the factual foundation out from under Trump’s campaign, which repeatedly denied any wrongdoing on the night of March 8, when the incident occurred following a press conference at Trump’s resort in Jupiter, Fla.
But in the hours between the tape’s release and Trump taking the stage here, any chance of it separating Trump from his fans vanished. As the networks played the tape on loop, the footage — much like Trump itself — became a Rorschach test, with everyone seeing what they wanted to.
Trump wrapped up the hour-long town hall by portraying Lewandowski, a former police officer, as a sympathetic family man wrongly accused, and later — in yet another hour of national television afforded to him — portrayed himself as a defender of the downtrodden who stood with his maligned staffer when others wouldn’t. “At first I said, ‘Oh this is terrible’,” Trump said. “And then I saw the tape. She bolts into the picture, she hits me on the arm and then he goes by and maybe he touched her a little bit,” Trump continued. “It was almost like he was trying to keep her off me, like he was trying to help her.”
Trump’s critics saw a misogynist caught lying to defend another misogynist, and the condemnations came from all corners. Trump’s GOP rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, both condemned Lewandowski’s behavior and Trump’s reaction to it. Democrats pounced, and a host of groups waiting for Trump should he reach a general election gave him a taste of what’s in store.
And so the video that might in a different time have ended the controversy served only to heighten it. And if past is prologue, each new piece of information about Lewandowski, or all other things Trump, will only further that divide—no longer simply between Republicans and Democrats but all for whom Trump personifies their own idealized America and others who see him as an affront to the country’s founding principles.
Outside the Holiday Inn in the hours leading up to the rally Tuesday afternoon, hundreds of protesters mingled uneasily with several thousands of Trump supporters as they stood in a long, snaking line and, for those who were later unable to fit inside the venue, as they stood outside and listened to Trump’s voice emanating from speakers. At least nine police officers armed with binoculars, cameras and rifles looked on from the building’s rooftop.
Along the road leading from the highway to the hotel, the protesters gathered behind a large banner of white butcher paper with red stop signs that read ‘Stop Trump.’ Many held up smaller signs — a white poster with “End racism, stop Trump” scrawled in black pen, a neon yellow sign reading ‘Great leaders unite, not divide.”
Nearby, more than a dozen vendors hawked paraphernalia from card tables, including t-shirts that read, “Trump: finally someone with balls” and “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica” (On the back: “Trump that b—-”) on the sidewalk in front of a Fuddruckers.
As Trump spoke, some listened. Peggy Sue Metz, 47, a trucking dispatcher from Rockton, Illinois, lamented not making it inside and being forced to share the sidewalk with the protesters, who she suspected, were raised with the values of unionized schoolteachers rather than those of their own parents. “It would be nice go back to the days when the father worked and could support five kids and the mother could stay home and raise the kids properly,” she said.
Other pro- and anti-Trump people in the crowd traded insults, argued about race, and jockeyed to block each other’s signs from view. Police removed several members of the crowd from the property, and at least one young woman was Maced.
Inside, pacing back and forth on a dais in front of a blue curtain draped with the American and Wisconsin state flags, Trump declared that his campaign was more than a bid for the White House but a profound social movement.
“I’m a messenger,” Trump declared. “This is something that’s so special and so amazing, it’s on the cover of Time magazine. It’s a phenomenon.”
Whatever people see, everyone is watching Trump — and the spectacle of it all continues to relegate his rivals to bit players in an ongoing reality television show of a campaign that continues to devolve. Hours after his Janesville town hall, Trump took part in a CNN “town hall” in Milwaukee, where he distracted from the Lewandowski controversy by stirring another, rescinding his pledge to support the Republican nominee for president.
“We’ll see who it is,” he said, asserting that he had been treated “unfairly” by the Republican National Committee and the GOP establishment, many of whom are funding super PAC efforts to attack him and plotting how to take the nomination away from him during the convention in Cleveland.
Having dominated the country’s airwaves and campaign coverage for nine months, Trump has managed to program his supporters to the point that they deliver his lines for him, finishing his sentences about building a border wall and forcing Mexico to pay for it, responding to mentions of rivals like Cruz by shouting out, “Lyin Ted,” the cutting moniker Trump has successfully hung around yet another competitor’s neck.
They even give voice to statements Trump himself is unwilling to make explicit. Here Tuesday in Paul Ryan’s hometown, Trump steered clear of criticizing the Speaker of the House himself — because he figured out a way to have his audience do it for him.
“How do you like Paul Ryan?” Trump asked the crowd. “I was told to be nice to Paul Ryan.”
Boos rose up from the room.
“Paul R.I.N.O.,” someone shouted.
“Wow,” Trump said. “I’m very surprised at this statement.”
He was not really that surprised.
Nor was he truly at a loss when he feigned disbelief about why “Harley guys” preferred him to their own motorcycle-riding governor, Scott Walker.
“He comes in on his motorcycle, but the motorcycle guys like Trump,” Trump said.
“Why do they like me? Tell me,” he continued, assuming an answer was forthcoming from the crowd—and it was.
“Because you don’t take any shit,” a man in the front row called out loudly enough to be heard in the back of the room.
