Donald Trump insisted yesterday that he’s received “hundreds of phone calls” from people who saw “with their own eyes” a massive celebration of the 9/11 attacks in Jersey City, something of which there are no there are no news reports, photographs or videos and which law enforcement officials say never happened.
Iowa talk radio host Simon Conway told Trump yesterday that he wanted to ask him about substantive policy issues because “this stuff gets lost because people want to rile you up and get you to say something controversial.”
So, of course, the two spent the next few minutes talking about Trump’s debunked claim about the 9/11 celebrations.
“Did you see all the people coming out now saying I was right, there were people dancing the streets, dancing on rooftops?” Trump asked. “I mean, I know it happened. And, by the way, worldwide they were dancing all over the place, they were dancing in different countries, so why wouldn’t they? I mean over there, it’s a very large Muslim population and I saw it reported, but all of a sudden people are coming out of the woodwork — I’ve had hundreds of phone calls, and I’m sure you have too, but I’ve had hundreds of people that were in New Jersey and saw it with their own eyes.”
Conway also asked Trump about yesterday’s mass shooting in California, to which Trump responded that gun violence is “a mental health problem.”
“It’s a mental health problem, it really is,” he said. “And it’s really very sad because they don’t talk about mental health, and many places like New York and California, they’ve opened up their mental asylums and let people out on the streets because they can’t afford it anymore.”
He also placed part of the blame on gun-free zones: “You know they have these gun-free zones, that’s sort of target practice for the bad ones, for the bad guys, you say ‘gun-free zone’ and they love it.”
