The GOP VP nominee dodges reporters asking about Trump making the most aggressive, crude comments about women yet
TOLEDO, Ohio — Mike Pence took the stage here just over an hour after a tape emerged of Donald Trump crudely bragging about sexually harassing women and pretended as though no such tape existed.
.. “How can you ignore this question?” an ABC reporter asked repeatedly, as Pence simply smiled and shook hands.
.. “Governor, what’s your reaction to the Trump tape?” Pence was asked by POLITICO as he shook hands and an aide whisper over his shoulder. “Governor, The Washington Post report, what is your reaction?”
Pence simply kept shaking hands, moving down the line.
.. At the rally, Pence stuck to his usual stump speech, including a section in which he criticizes the media for focusing on some of Trump’s controversial past comments.
“And invariably, they’ll say, this time we got him, right? This time we found that there’s another tweet come out or something,” Pence said. “This time we got another thing, another issue that’s come forward. Then they turn on the television the next morning, and Donald Trump is still standing stronger than ever before and fighting for the American people. And he is going to fight all the way to the White House.”
Trump caught on tape making crude, sexually aggressive comments about women
‘I don’t even wait,’ he said — and bragged about how he would ‘grab them by the p—y.’
In Ohio, the reporters covering Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, at a restaurant were immediately instructed to return to the press bus after the news broke and were not permitted to film him leaving the restaurant. Pence’s team insisted that was normal procedure.
.. In the tape, Trump, who was only recently married to Melania Trump at the time, says of an unknown woman, “I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it.” “I did try and fuck her,” Trump added. “She was married.”
.. According to “Access Hollywood,” the tape was discovered in its archives after the show’s staff read an Associated Press story about Trump’s treatment of women on his NBC reality show “The Apprentice.” But the Post obtained the recording on its own, and published it at around 4:00 p.m. on Friday, before the entertainment program was able to air its own version.
.. Within minutes of the tape’s release, in what appeared to be a strategic counterstrike, WikiLeaks dumped more than 2,000 emails it claimed were hacked from top Clinton adviser John Podesta’s personal email account ..
.. “The women who are still entertaining the possibility of Donald Trump, what they’re waiting for is the possibility that he tones it down,” Matthews said. “…It is not presidential. It is not toning it down.”
Conservatives try to undercut Christie’s role in Trump land
‘Conservatives are very nervous about Chris Christie,’ says the leader of one activist group, with judgeships and top White House jobs potentially at stake.
But behind the scenes, there’s an insurrection-in-the-making among powerful conservative groups in Washington that are skeptical of Christie’s leadership and want to exert influence over the process of filling roughly 4,000 jobs as part of a new administration, to say nothing of top White House slots and judgeships.
.. “For his judicial nominees as the New Jersey governor, he appointed a bunch of liberals, or he treated the nominations like political payoff positions. It is the type of approach that would be devastating for Trump to have Christie, as attorney general, picking judges or applying the same approach to fill key regulatory positions in the EPA or Treasury Department.”
.. one person on the Trump transition told POLITICO that there is simmering tension between the team’s conservative and moderate Republicans, who have vastly different visions for a future Trump White House.
.. Other conservative activists say they feel best about Christie’s leadership of the transition team when he’s surrounded by conservatives, such as Becky Norton Dunlop and Ed Feulner of The Heritage Foundation.
“Looking at the totality of the transition team, I am comfortable,” another leader of a conservative activist group said.
.. Reservations about Christie persist among some in Trump’s inner circle, including with son-in-law Jared Kushner Because, as U.S. Attorney, Christie successfully prosecuted Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, for tax evasion and witness tampering.
.. Trump is a Northeasterner. He likes Christie and [Rudy] Giuliani. They talk like him. It’s a cultural thing.”
.. As far as Bridgegate is concerned, there’s a general sense in Trump world that Christie can survive the courtroom drama unfolding in New Jersey, barring any devastating revelations. “His scandal in relation to both candidates’ current issues is a walk in the park,” one Republican said. “As far as scandals go, Christie’s looks the least damaging.”
..Clay Johnson, the head of George W. Bush’s transition team, told reporters at a recent even:, “Gov. Christie is the chairman of the transition, but the person driving all of the work is Rich Bagger.”
5 things to watch in the vice presidential debate
Trump’s taxes are the single most effective attack line Clinton’s campaign has against him in the homestretch, a slow-motion scandal akin to her slow-drip email nightmare. His refusal to release the returns — and his ill-considered blurt that he was “smart” to avoid paying at the first debate was followed by a bombshell of sorts: The New York Times was leaked portions of his 1995 tax return showing that he lost nearly a billion bucks on his lousy casino and real estate deals.
.. If there’s any pressure on Kaine, it’s that he has a reputation as a very good debater, a point my colleague Anna Palmer made recently, evidenced by his cool dismantling of opponent George Allen in the 2012 Virginia Senate race.
.. Despite his nice-guy rep, Kaine has a mean(ish) streak, and has no problem going negative. His somewhat awkward convention speech featured a game, if not quite Alec-Baldwin-quality imitation of Trump, and his stump speech is peppered with attack lines.