Trump sleaze

Trump taunts media to its face

The real estate mogul calls one reporter a 'sleaze' and another a 'real beauty' as he defends his veterans donations at Trump Tower.

By Eli Stokols and Nolan D. McCaskill

Donald Trump, whose entire campaign can seem like an experiment in free media, was simply trying to keep a low profile when he held an impromptu, televised fundraiser for veterans groups in January instead of participating in a GOP primary debate.

At least that’s the story the presumptive Republican nominee was spinning for dozens of reporters gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower Tuesday morning — and to millions more watching the cable networks’ live blanket coverage of the entire 40-minute news conference — as he chastised the media for failing to give him his due, blasting one reporter as a “sleaze” and another as “a real beauty.”

Stepping to the podium with veterans standing behind him, Trump at first failed to mention the controversy of his campaign’s charitable disbursements to dozens of veterans groups — ostensibly, the reason he’d called the news conference in the first place. In his opening remarks, he wished LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers good luck in the NBA finals and touted the latest batch of promising poll numbers. He did not turn to the subject at hand until a reporter asked him about it.

Trump, who’d stated at the January fundraiser that his campaign had raised more than $6 million for veterans groups that night, told reporters that his campaign has now sent $5.6 million to a number of veterans groups, which he rattled off one by one in between broadsides at news media audacious enough to ask for corroboration.

“If we could, I wanted to keep it private because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business if I wanna send money to the vets,” Trump said, after accusing Hillary Clinton’s campaign of sending protesters to picket outside of Trump Tower. “I raised close to $6 million. It’ll probably be over that amount when it’s all said and done, but as of this moment, it’s $5.6 million.”

Trump said a lot of the money was sent “very early” but stressed that the organizations had to be vetted first.

“You have to go through a process. When you send checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars to people and to companies and to groups that you’ve never heard of, charitable organizations, you have to vet it,” Trump said. “You send people out. You do a lot of work. Now, most of the money went out quite a while ago — some of it went out more recently.”

Then the media onslaught began. “The press should be ashamed at themselves, and on behalf of the vets, the press should be ashamed of themselves. They are calling me and they are furious,” Trump said.

“Instead of being like, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Trump,’ or ‘Trump did a good job,’ everyone said: ‘Who got it? Who got it? Who got it?’” Trump said. “And you make me look very bad. I have never received such bad publicity for doing a good job.”

Moments later, he called out Tom Llamas, a journalist with ABC News.

“I could have asked all these groups to come here and I didn’t want to do that. I’m not looking for credit. But what I don’t want is, when I raise millions of dollars, have people say, like this sleazy guy right over here from ABC,” Trump said, pointing to Llamas. “He’s a sleaze in my book. You’re a sleaze because you know the facts and you know the facts well.”

Despite his professions of disgust at the media for forcing him to respond to its lingering questions about his fundraising, Trump held forth with reporters for nearly 45 minutes. He tangled with CNN’s Jim Acosta and Fox News Channel’s Carl Cameron, and blasted Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, who is trying to recruit a mainstream conservative to step forward as an independent candidate to prevent Trump from winning the White House, calling Kristol “a loser” whose magazine “is failing.”

Trump suggested that the reporters’ stories are “probably libelous” and warned that he’s willing to stay on the offensive against the media, all while the television networks continued to broadcast his remarks for free to millions of viewers.

“This is going to phenomenal groups, and I have many of these people vetting the people that are getting the money and working hard and then we have to read probably libelous stories — or certainly close — in the newspapers,” Trump said of the donations. “And the people know the stories are false. I’m gonna continue to attack the press. Look, I find the press to be extremely dishonest. I find the political press to be unbelievably dishonest, I will say that.”

The real estate mogul’s most noteworthy contribution was a $1.1 million donation to the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation.

“I gave a million dollars to them,” he said, explaining that he was familiar with the organization because it honored him last year with a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. “They’re a great group.”

Trump said “100 percent” of the organizations received their funds, with the exception of Project for Patriots, a group he said is still being vetted.

“The check is ready to go, but they don’t have all of their appropriate” documentation, he said.

At one point, Trump called on Al Baldasaro, who is leading his campaign’s outreach to veterans, to step to the podium to continue the blasting of the media. Baldasaro, wearing a camouflage-colored “Make America Great Again” hat, urged reporters to stop questioning Trump’s generosity and to focus on actual issues affecting veterans.

“Donald Trump is doing this from the heart. You’re all focused on the way he is raising money, and you’re not looking at the 22 veterans who are killing each other every day,” Baldasaro said. “You’re not concerned about the thousands of veterans that are on waitlists. Look at his plan — on Trump’s website — he talks about medical cards, he talks about fixing the VA, he talks about competition.

“I think the liberal media — and I’ve been dealing with you for a long time — get your heads out of your butts and focus on the real issues,” he concluded.

In reality though, Trump’s morning news conference was just the latest event staged to ensure that the media spotlight remains squarely trained on him. As he called on reporter after reporter, he fielded questions on a range of subjects: his ongoing search for a running mate, the judge in the Trump University case he continues to malign as “unfair” and “bad” without further explanation, the possibility of Hillary Clinton being charged with a felony and, thanks to one reporter, the gorilla fatally shot recently at the Cincinnati Zoo.

In all of it, Trump made no actual news. Once again, he simply was the news. The familiar tableau played out just hours before two cable TV interviews with Clinton were due to air, an indication that the presumptive Democratic nominee is coming to realize the need to insert herself more fully into the mass media bloodstream Trump has dominated for nearly a year. And it increased the likelihood that a number of the questions she gets will be asking her to respond to him.

That's exactly what happened.

Clinton, who also fended off questions about her private email server at the State Department, spent the majority of her phone interviews responding to Trump's antics.

“Well, I think the problem here is the difference between what Donald Trump says and what Donald Trump does,” Clinton told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “He's bragged for months about raising $6 million for veterans and donating a million dollars himself. But it took a reporter to shame him into actually making his contribution and getting the money to veterans. Look, I'm glad he finally did, but I don't know that he should get much credit for that.”