Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he doesn’t regret reading aloud Sen. Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number Tuesday at a rally in South Carolina, saying that “he calls me names, you have to fight back.”
“No, I don’t regret it — I mean, it seems to have gotten a lot of press, but I don’t regret it at all, no,” Mr. Trump said on “Fox and Friends.” “He calls me names, you have to fight back. I mean, all of a sudden these guys are calling me names. I’m trying to be nice, I want to be nice, I’m a nice person — but everybody’s calling me names, and I guess since I went to number one in the polls, they’re having a field day on me.”
“I mean, he just came out — I’ve never seen anything like it, to be honest, he came out and started calling me a jackass on every program,” Mr. Trump said. “The guy’s got zero in the polls. He’s got nothing.”
“He’s got nothing going anyway. I don’t even think he’s very popular in his own state because you heard the applause I was getting, and I did it for fun, and everybody had a good time and we had a packed house. We had beyond a packed house, we had auditoriums next door that were packed,” he said. “I mean, the place was amazing — South Carolina. It was amazing.”
Christian Ferry, the manager of Mr. Graham’s 2016 presidential campaign, said Tuesday in response to Mr. Trump’s move that “Donald Trump continues to show hourly that he is ill-prepared to be commander in chief” and that Mr. Trump’s campaign is serving to draw attention away from the foreign policy failures of President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 2016 Democratic front-runner.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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