Donald Trump launched a fresh takedown of Hillary Clinton on Friday, with the Republican presidential nominee leading the effort and dispatching his surrogates to join the attack.
The real estate mogul maintained the blitz, even as Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, kicked off a post-Democratic National Convention rally Friday afternoon in Philadelphia in which Kaine derided last week’s GOP event.
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“The Republican convention was like a twisted and negative tour,” he said. “It wasn’t a tour of this country, it was a journey through Donald Trump’s mind. And that is a very frightening place.”
While Trump may have not paid Kaine any attention, he tweeted that “I am watching Crooked Hillary speak.”
But all he saw was the “[s]ame old stuff,” he said, adding that “our country needs to change!”
He also tweeted a 30-second video in response to Clinton’s prime-time acceptance speech at the DNC.
“In Hillary Clinton’s America, things get worse,” a narrator declares. “In Donald Trump’s America, people are put back to work, our families are safe, the American dream achievable again — change that makes America great again.”
Trump, who has frequently claimed that Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to his campaign, continued his recruitment Friday, casting their progressive hero as a sellout who regrets the deal he made to back Clinton.
He posted a 40-second mashup of the Vermont senator’s critical comments against Clinton throughout their bitter primary with the message, “What Bernie Sanders really thinks of Crooked Hillary Clinton.”
In it, Sanders says Clinton isn’t qualified to be president, questions whether she’s truly a progressive while calling out her judgment, and blasts her for supporting “disastrous” trade deals.
“Wow, my campaign is hearing from more and more Bernie supporters that they will NEVER support Crooked Hillary. She sold them out, V.P. pick!” Trump said in another tweet, alluding to Clinton’s choice of the centrist Kaine as a running mate over someone like Sanders, who wasn’t under consideration, or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Trump also argued that Sanders was upset during Clinton’s address — and blamed the media for not reporting it. “The dishonest media didn’t mention that Bernie Sanders was very angry looking during Crooked’s speech,” Trump said. “He wishes he didn’t make that deal!”
But he didn’t stop there. He mocked the Clintons in an Instagram video he linked to via Twitter.
“Even Bill is tired of the lies, SAD!” he wrote. The video begins with the all-caps text: “Everybody was tired of the lies during Crooked Hillary’s speech…” and transitions into a clip of former President Bill Clinton allegedly nodding off, though it’s unclear whether he’s asleep or taking in the moment. “It’s time to wake up and make America great again!” the video concludes.
Trump, who is campaigning in Colorado Springs and Denver on Friday, has been on a furious Twitter tear. He spent the morning blasting Clinton’s DNC speech.
“Crooked Hillary said that I ‘couldn’t handle the rough and tumble of a political campaign.’ Really, I just beat 16 people and am beating her!” Trump wrote in one tweet.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton mentioned me 22 times in her very long and very boring speech. Many of her statements were lies and fabrications!” he said in another.
He also angry tweeted at former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (“’Little’ Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!”) — and retired four-star Gen. John Allen (“General John Allen, who I never met but spoke against me last night, failed badly in his fight against ISIS. His record = BAD #NeverHillary”) — for giving two of the most forceful condemnations of Trump this week.
Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, morphed the billionaire’s broadside into a team takedown of Clinton and the surrogates she allowed on the Philadelphia stage. But Pence did so in more of an Indiana nice kind of way.
“The speech last night was nothing new. It was just more of the same, more government, more of the same failed foreign policy,” Pence said in an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” renewing the Trump campaign’s drumbeat of attacks against her foreign policy record and her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
“I just think the choice could not be clearer,” he continued. “I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Hillary Clinton last night. She doubled down on their big government, liberal agenda, on a weak foreign policy on the world stage. And so now we’ve got 100 days to debate this before the American people.”
But Clinton’s No. 2 was ready to counter.
Kaine called his running mate’s speech “really great” and noted the stark difference in tones between her speech and the ones delivered a week ago at the Republican National Convention.
“The thing I thought was great is it set such a contrast with what we saw in Cleveland last week. The Cleveland convention was dark and depressing, and she said it was kind of midnight in America. And her speech was morning in America,” Kaine said in an interview on CNN’s “New Day.” “It was about the everyday struggles that people have, but the fact that we don’t have a single issue in this country that our people can’t tackle, because we have the greatest pool of just human resources, human capital, human talent that any nation has ever had.”
The Virginia senator said he “got goose bumps on my arm” at just the mention of Khizr Khan, the Muslim father whose Army captain son was killed in Iraq in 2004 and was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his heroism. Khan offered to lend Trump his own copy of the U.S. Constitution and told the GOP nominee, “You have sacrificed nothing.”
Khan’s speech, Kaine said, was “an absolutely electric moment in the building, and I suspect it was electric for everybody watching it on television.”
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort added to the criticism of Clinton’s convention address, slamming her message as “very confusing.” He argued on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” that Clinton was forced to resort to frequent attacks against her Republican opponent, “because she has no message.”
Manafort also renewed another frequent Trump line of attack against Clinton, that in an election cycle in which the majority of Americans see their country on the wrong track, she represents only the status quo. For all her attacks against the Manhattan businessman, Manafort said Clinton “can’t hide from 25 years” in the public eye.
“If it’s midnight in America, it’s because of the 7½ years of the Obama/Clinton administration,” Manafort said.
Stephen Miller, another Trump adviser, called Clinton’s speech “an insulting collection of clichés and recycled rhetoric,” in a statement released on the candidate’s website. He said the speech was “delivered from a fantasy universe, not the reality we live in today.”
But Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said it was Clinton’s résumé that shined through at Thursday night’s convention. In a separate interview on CNN’s “New Day” that preceded Kaine’s, Coons called Clinton “the most seasoned and capable and experienced candidate ever to accept the nomination of a major party.”
“They were reminded of her remarkable lifetime of service, of all the peoples whose lives she has helped and touched,” Coons said when asked what voters learned from Clinton’s remarks. “And we heard a full-throated defense from Gen. Allen, from the father of a fallen Muslim soldier, that reminded us that at this moment when the world is genuinely unstable and insecure, that she is the right leader to bring us forward. This was a remarkably positive and powerful convention.”
Trump campaign spokesman Katrina Pierson extended the anti-Clinton attack to include former President Bill Clinton, blaming the potential first gentleman for the rise of the Islamic State.
“This started when Bill Clinton allowed Osama bin Laden to get away, and here we are today,” she said during a panel discussion on CNN.
[Source:- Polito]
