Donald Trump criticized the pastor who interrupted him during a Wednesday speech in Flint, Michigan as a “nervous mess” Thursday, implying that she might have planned to upstage him before he even began his remarks.
“Something was up because I noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me," Trump said on "Fox & Friends” when interviewed by phone. “She was so nervous, she was shaking.”
Trump had arrived in Flint for a few hours Wednesday afternoon to visit a closed water treatment center and to speak briefly on the ongoing crisis that has poisoned the city’s water with lead.
Trump then went to Bethel United Methodist Church, where he began speaking about Flint but veered into attacking Hillary Clinton’s record on the economy and foreign policy.
“Everything she touched didn’t work out,” he said, before the Rev. Faith Green-Timmons approached him on the stage.
“Mr. Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint, not to give a political speech,” she said.
Trump heeded her advice in the moment. “Okay, that’s good,” he said quickly. “I’m going to go back onto Flint,” he added, to applause.
Trump criticized the decline of the city — “Flint's pain is a result of so many different failures” — and tried to position himself as the candidate able to fix the kinds of failures that had led to the city’s problems.
On Thursday, Trump punched back at Green-Timmons in his Fox appearance, suggesting that her nervousness implied something else.
“I said, ‘Wow this is sort of strange,’ and then she came up,” Trump said on Fox. “She had that in mind, there’s no question about it.”
But Trump said he was unbothered that “everyone plays their games.”
“I'll tell you what made me feel good,” he said. “The audience was saying let him speak, let him speak, and the audience was so great and these are mostly African-American people, phenomenal people and they want to see change," Trump said.
An NPR reporter at the event said there was no such response from the crowd — in fact, reporter Scott Detrow wrote, audience members asked “pointed questions about whether he racially discriminated against black tenants as a landlord.”
It was Green-Timmons who told them to quiet down, calling Trump “a guest of my church,” NPR reported.
Green-Timmons had told reporters that Trump’s appearance at her church was not an endorsement, but rather a means to draw more attention to Flint’s water issues. Clinton has repeatedly referenced the lead contamination in Flint, but Trump’s visit Wednesday was the first to the city.
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