Donald Trump: "They said, 'Debbie, you're fired'"
Donald Trump seemed to relish the downfall of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as he campaigned with running mate Mike Pence in Roanoke, Virginia.
"I always knew she was highly overrated," he said. "Not good. But she just got fired," Trump said. "They said 'Debbie, you're fired!'"
He spent several minutes talking about Wasserman Schultz, who on Monday was booed by her own state's delegation and dropped her original plans to gavel in the opening session over fears she could receive the same reception on the convention floor. She had announced Sunday she would step down as DNC chair over a cache of DNC emails released by Wikileaks showing that top party officials had disparaged Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign.
"Debbie was totally loyal to Hillary, and Hillary threw her under the bus," Trump said. "Man, I don't want her covering my back."
Wasserman Schultz, he said, "worked very hard to rig the system" for Clinton. "Little did she know that China, Russia...came in and hacked the hell out of us," Trump said, referring to Clinton campaign accusations that Russia might be behind the hacking of the DNC email system. Then, he quipped that investigators might find even more. "I guarantee they'll find the 33,000 emails," he said.
Trump marvelled at the idea that DNC officials would bring up Sanders' religion. And he noted that Sanders had himself told his supporters to vote for Clinton and Kaine, "and his own people are out there booing. It's pretty bad," he said.
He also attacked Clinton's new running mate Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia, saying that he's "done a terrible job for Virginia," and "nobody even knows who he is."
Kaine, Trump said, compared unfavorably to his own running mate, Pence -- charging that GDP had remained flat, unemployment doubled, and he had proposed a $4 billion tax hike on Virginians, including those making as little as $17,000 per year. Kaine was, however governor during the the financial crisis, when unemployment rose across the U.S. and growth stagnated.
"Weird little dude there. I don't know what's going on there," he also said of Kaine at one point.
Aside from the town hall, Trump was openly aggravated about the temperature in the hotel ballroom.
"Everyone is sweating and soaking wet, right? here's the difference. I wouldn't pay the hotel bill," he said. "If we're in a ballroom, it's not supposed to be so hot that everybody in the audience is using a fan."
Trump hypothesized that the temperature soared because the hotel was trying to save money.
"It's cooler outside than it is in this damn ballroom," he groused. "I think the ballroom and the people that run this hotel should be ashamed of themselves."