It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Thanksgiving Week for Donald Trump and his bid to buy the presidency. He was deservedly blasted for mocking a disabled reporter at a rally–and didn’t do himself any favors by claiming his critics should be the one to apologize. He also learned that he may face a lawsuit from a man who endured a violent beating at the hands of his supporters at a campaign rally.
Well, it may have just gotten worse. Trump has come under well-deserved fire for his disgraceful Tuesday night mocking of Serge Kovaleski, a veteran journalist who has arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that limits joint movement. Trump’s only defense so far is that he doesn’t remember knowing Kovaleski, let alone know that he is disabled. Trump says he was just making sport of Kovaleski backing away from supposed memories of “thousands” of North Jersey Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center towers went down. Trump has made this claim numerous times on the stump, and argues that a Washington Post article by Kovaleski backs him up–even though that claim has been debunked several times over.
Kovaleski, now at The New York Times, didn’t take this lying down. On Thursday, he claimed that he had been on “a first-name basis” with Trump when he worked at the (New York) Daily News in the late 1980s and covered Trump’s business career. The Daily News backed him up by releasing an archived article Kovaleski wrote in 1989 about the maiden voyage of the Trump Shuttle.
Kovaleski covered the New York-Boston and New York-Washington shuttle’s maiden voyage after Trump bought it from Eastern Airlines–including a press conference Trump held at La Guardia Airport. Kovaleski pointed out that the shuttle was 12 to 18 minutes late on its first run, even though Trump had touted that it would be the most on-time airline in the nation. According to Kovaleski, “Trump was furious” when he read this in the Daily News the next day, and personally cursed Kovaleski out over the speakerphone.
But wait a minute–Trump says he couldn’t even pick Kovaleski out of a crowd. And yet, he knew Kovaleski’s office number at the time? Your pants are on fire, Donald. You knew who you were mocking, and you’re insulting our intelligence by saying otherwise.
But even if you do buy Trump’s claim that he doesn’t know Kovaleski, he is still on record as finding it acceptable to mock disabled people on the campaign trail. In a more civilized political environment, he would have been drummed out of the race by Wednesday morning. If Trump has anything left in him, he will publicly apologize to Kovaleski and all disabled Americans–while he announces his withdrawal from the race.
