Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who referred to Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton as “shrill” at an event in South Carolina Wednesday, said the term doesn’t apply exclusively to women.
“I think the word shrill doesn’t apply to women exclusively,” Mr. Trump said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I know men that are shrill, and it’s just an expression that I thought of as I was speaking — I thought it was a very accurate expression.”
“She’s gotten very loud, she’s gotten very boisterous, and that can happen,” he said. “Men, too … please, if you don’t mind, that can happen to men.”
“She’s gotten very loud and obnoxious and, frankly, I know many men that become very loud and obnoxious, also,” he said. “But I’ve noticed that she — I don’t know; there’s something going on with her. There’s really something going on. I think she’s going to make a terrible candidate just as she was a terrible secretary of state.”
Asked if he would call or have called any of his male competitors in the 2016 race “shrill,” Mr. Trump said, “No, but I would.”
“I would call Rand Paul shrill,” he said. “I think he’s shrill. I don’t think that’s a term that applies exclusively to women at all.”
At an event in South Carolina Wednesday, Mr. Trump said Mrs. Clinton has become “very shrill,” as he claimed she actually started the “birther” controversy in 2008 over whether President Obama was born in the United States.
“You know the word, ‘shrill?’ ” he said. “She has become shrill. She was saying, ‘Oh, what I said about Obama …’ And yet in 2008, she was the original birther! She’s the one that started that whole thing! Hillary is a birther!”
“By the way, don’t switch your votes to Hillary, please,” said Mr. Trump, who claimed credit in 2011 after the White House released Mr. Obama’s long-form birth certificate. “But Hillary is the one that started it. Check it out — 2008.”
Asked Wednesday by CNN’s Don Lemon whether she or her campaign started “the whole birther thing,” Mrs. Clinton said on “The Tom Joyner Morning Show:” “No — that is so ludicrous, Don.”
“I have been blamed for nearly everything,” she said. “That was a new one to me.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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