It turns out Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who in March was accused of assaulting a reporter and was shown on video appearing to grab a protester by the collar, values his own personal space.
During an interview Monday on CNN, Lewandowski, now a CNN political commentator, clashed with Christine Quinn, vice chair of the New York Democratic Party, over Trump’s ongoing attack of a Muslim-American couple whose son, Army Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, was killed in 2004 while fighting in Iraq.
“Don’t touch me!” Lewandowski shouted, after Quinn gently grazed his hand in an attempt to keep from being interrupted. He added that she needs to “relax.”
In a moving speech last week at the Democratic National Convention, the soldier’s father, Khizr Khan, said Trump has “sacrificed nothing and no one.”
Trump has since attempted to defend himself against Khan’s criticism, and suggested his wife, Ghazala Khan, kept quiet during the convention because of their faith. Ghazala Khan said later that she didn’t speak because she knew she would lose her composure when the convention displayed photographs of her son.
Lewandowski said on CNN that Trump has a right to defend himself against the Khan family’s public “attacks,” and that “if Donald Trump were president, Capt. Khan would still be alive today because we never would have entered the Iraq War in the first place.”
Quinn called Trump’s statements about Khan’s mother “ridiculous” and “outrageously un-American.”
“Any decent person who saw Mrs. Khan on stage could see the pain and grief on her face,” Quinn said. “And any person who has lost anyone, or even any person who’s been so blessed they haven’t, could understand why she couldn’t talk, even all these years later, about losing her son in the way she lost him.”
When Lewandowski tried to interject, Quinn snapped back. That’s when Lewandowski told her, “you gotta relax a little bit” and to keep her hands to herself.
“Oh calm down,” Quinn responded. “I’m not going to relax, because we have a man running for president of the United States who made a Gold Star mother have to go on TV and cry in front of America. ... This isn’t about politics, this isn’t about presidential campaigns. It’s not even about me nicely touching your arm. It is about decency.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
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