You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
Skip Navigation

Trump admits that he has a personal reaction to Kavanaugh accusation.

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty

On Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump gave a rare press conference, which quickly devolved into a strange free-association rant, with a special focus on the troubled Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

“It’s a horrible con game,” Trump said. “Hopefully over the next couple of days it will be settled up and solved and we will have a Supreme Court Justice who will go down as the greatest ever.” He praised Kavanaugh as a “tremendous genius.”

Trump did slightly qualify the “con game” remark by saying he was willing to listen to the accusers who have alleged sexual assault by Kavanaugh. But the president also seemed to be under the mistaken impression that all three accusers would be speaking at a Senate hearing tomorrow, when in fact only one would be.

As the questioning proceeded, a testy Trump told a female reporter that, “You’ve been asking a question for ten minutes. Please sit down.”

Trump spoke passionately about how he himself has been accused of sexual assault. “I’ve had a lot of false charges against me, unfortunately,” He asserted. He claimed that four or five women who made these accusations were paid to do so. In fact, there are more than twenty allegations against Trump.

Asked why he gave men like Roy Moore, Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly the benefit of the doubt when they were accused, Trump said, “It’s not a benefit of the doubt. I’ve known them for a long time, a lot of these people.” The president also suggested that his predecessor George Washington would also be subject to personal attacks by the Democratic Party if he were nominated by the Supreme Court. “He may have had a bad past, who knows?” Trump asked. “Didn’t he have a couple of things in his past?”

Elsewhere in the press conference, he claimed China respected “Donald Trump’s very, very large brain.” He also referred to a Kurdish reporter as “Mr. Kurd.”