Trump steers clear of the Khans, but finds other distractions – Politico

Donald Trump appears finished with his four-day feud with the parents of a slain U.S. soldier, but he’s showing no sign of shifting his full focus to Hillary Clinton.

At a Virginia rally on Tuesday, Trump riffed about collecting a Purple Heart medal, claimed that polls are rigged against him and resurrected his ongoing beef with cable news channels.

For good measure, he also ejected a crying baby.

The rambunctious rally was part and parcel with Trump’s bizarre start to the general election, a period that candidates typically spend refining their own message and casting their opponent in a negative light. But message discipline has not been a strong suit for Trump, and after his freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness rally style carried him through the primary, he — at least so far — plans to stay the course.

At Tuesday’s rally, held in Ashburn, Virginia, some 30 miles outside of Washington, Trump did spend much of his address detailing his plans for the presidency, ripping Hillary Clinton’s qualifications and reiterating his call to build a stronger military, renegotiate trade agreements and other various proposals.

“We have people that don’t know what they’re doing. Hillary Clinton will be worse. She’ll be worse,” Trump vowed, remarking that Clinton has “bad relationships” with leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“This is a nuclear country we’re talking about. Russia. Strong nuclear country. And so are we. But their stuff is newer. Their stuff is newer,” Trump said, as a person in the audience chimed in that the Russians have more. “I don’t even want to say it. They have a lot more, OK? So, OK, she wants to play the tough one? She’s not tough. She’s not tough. I know tough people. She’s not tough.”

Recalling Clinton’s acceptance speech, Trump asked, “Do you think she looks presidential? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.” He added: “She should be tough on trade because right now we are being ripped off like no one else in history.”

And, for his second public appearance in a row, Trump did not mention Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. The parents stood together at the Democratic National Convention while Khizr Khan excoriated Trump for his views on Muslims, immigration and the Constitution. Trump suggested that Ghazala Khan didn’t speak because her Muslim religion did not “allow” her to. Both parents have hit back since, and Trump has faced broad, bipartisan condemnation for attacking a Gold Star family.

He avoided that pitfall Tuesday but managed to go on several other non-Clinton tangents, and not just to ask a mother to remove one of the rally’s youngest attendees. Trump talked at length about the unfairness of polls and the media.

“I see one from CNN where we’re down,” he said, in reference to a CNN/ORC poll that showed Clinton ahead by 9 points in a head-to-head matchup. “I think these polls—I don’t know—there’s something about these polls, there’s something phony.”

Trump blasted CNN’s coverage in particular for being too critical of him, boasting that the network’s ratings “are gonna start to go down” because he refuses to grant interviews to its reporters. While suggesting that he still watches the network, Trump maintained that he still does not watch himself, as he declared in a late June tweet.

“You learn to live good, you learn to stay healthy, you learn to have a good common smart mind by turning off the negative,” Trump said. “Does that make sense? Don’t fight it. Just turn it off. Turn it off. But CNN treats me so badly.”

Pivoting to the “failing New York Times,” Trump continued his criticism of the newspaper for its coverage, speculating that it will be “out of business in three years.”

“They write stories that are so bad about me,” Trump said. “And you know, all my life, I’ve probably been on the cover of the Times a few times, right? Now, if I have two stories or three stories a day on the cover. Today, I have two stories. Both ridiculous stories. But today I have two stories. On the front page.

“I mean, I guess they use me to sell newspapers. But they are so dishonest. The reporting is so dishonest,” Trump said, before mentioning that “they have a few good ones over there.”

The Times wants Clinton to win “so badly,” Trump continued, “that they cry, they beg, they beg.”

Trump criticized what he called a disparity in coverage between the Republican convention speech of Patricia Smith, the mother of the U.S. Foreign Service official Sean Smith, who was killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and of Khizr Khan at the Democratic convention the next week.

“I mean when they don’t take Patti Smith. When they don’t take Pat and — who’s an unbelievable woman and they give her virtually no air time and they give other people unbelievable amounts of air — it’s just so unfair,” Trump said. “We’re running against a rigged press. We’re running against dishonest people, OK? Really dishonest people.”

(On Monday, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade claimed that “nobody” on television news had covered Smith’s address, the mother of U.S. Foreign Service official Sean Smith, who was killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Politifact found that to be untrue, noting the speech was aired live by both CNN and MSNBC. Kilmeade corrected the record on Tuesday morning, noting that his network carried neither Smith nor Khan live.)

On social media, much of the talk following Trump’s rally revolved around his reaction to a baby crying in the crowd. “I love babies. I hear that baby crying, I like it. What a baby. What a beautiful baby,” Trump said upon hearing the crying infant.

Moments later, however, he reversed course: “Actually, I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here,” the Republican nominee said to laughter and applause. “That’s all right. Don’t worry. I, I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking. That’s OK. People don’t understand. That’s OK.”

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama, perhaps the one person capable of marshalling as much media attention as Trump, said at a White House press conference that Trump is “unfit” to be president.

“I said so last week, and he keeps on proving it,” Obama said, standing alongside the prime minister of Singapore. “The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia means that he’s woefully unprepared to do this job.”