Donald Trump, a dry creek bed mysteriously studded with dog turds, visited Flint, Michigan on Wednesday, stopping by a local church where he was supposed to express some kind of sympathy for the city’s ongoing, disastrous water crisis. Instead, he complained about Hillary Clinton until the pastor asked him to cut it out. If you supposed that Donald Trump would not stoop to attacking a pastor, I would like some of whatever you’ve been taking to sleep through this election.
Trump visited the Bethel United Methodist Church, a predominantly black congregation, where he tried very hard to go into his standard stump denunciation of Clinton. Rev. Faith Green Timmons firmly put a stop to that, telling him, “Mr. Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done for Flint. Not give a political speech.”
This morning on Fox News, Trump took the chance to attack Rev. Timmons by implying that her interruption was planned, and not a reaction to the things he was vomiting from her pulpit. Here’s the clip, spotted by MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin:
“Something was up,” he said. “I noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me. She called NBC ABC—you know, ABC was the owner of an NBC network and she said he owned ABC and we sorta smiled together backstage. And when she got up to introduce me, she was so nervous she was shaking. And I said, ‘Wow, this is sort of strange.’ And then she came up. So she had that in mind. There’s no question about it.”
Trump added that the interruption didn’t bother him: “Everyone plays their games. It doesn’t bother me. I’ll tell you what really made me feel good, the audience was saying ‘let him speak, let him speak. The audience was so great. And these are mostly African-American people, phenomenal people, and they want to see change. They’re living in —you have to see, the crime rate over there is ridiculous. The whole place, not only the water, what they did with the water is horrible, but the crime rate and all the other problems they have. And people want to see— you know, I sue the expression, I say, ‘What do you have to lose? I’m gonna fix it. I’m gonna fix it. What do you have to lose?’ I’ll tell you, the audience was fantastic, but she was so nervous. She was like a nervous mess. I figured something was up. Really.”
In reality, the Detroit Free Press reports that Trump was also interrupted by protesters asking questions about housing discrimination, probably because Trump’s real estate company was sued by the Justice Department for racial bias in the 1970s. (In 1975 the Trumps signed an agreement that didn’t admit any fault or liability, but did require them not to discriminate against minority renters and acquaint themselves with the Fair Housing Act.)
Trump ultimately spoke at Bethel for just over five minutes.