Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has spent much of his campaign railing against people who oppose him. So perhaps it’s fitting that a day before the election, he’s still spending time in speeches going after Beyoncé and Jay Z.
“If I ever said those words, it would be the reinstitution of the electric chair,” Trump said Monday, repeating a gripe that the two musical artists’ lyrics haven’t prompted the same outcry as his 2005 remark that fame let him grab women “by the pussy.”
He also implied he isn’t sure what rap music is.
“The language was so bad,” he said at a rally in Sarasota, Florida. “And as they were singing ― singing, right? Singing. Talking? Was it talking or singing? I don’t know.”
Beyoncé and Jay Z performed at a rally for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Friday, and Trump has been talking about it ever since.
It’s a diversion ― albeit a brief one ― from what has been a mostly on-message final stretch of his campaign, free of the type of gaffes that hurt him earlier on. His staff reportedly took away his free rein of his Twitter account (which he has used to criticize Beyoncé in the past).
But on stage, he’s free to rail against celebrities as he wishes.
“That’s almost like a form of cheating, right?” Trump said Saturday during a rally in Reno, Nevada, as he criticized Clinton for bringing celebrities into the campaign.
“I actually like Jay Z, but you know the language last night,” Trump said Saturday at an event in Tampa, Florida. “Ooh, ooooh, I was just thinking maybe I should just try it, should I use that language for one event? Can you imagine if I said that?”
Trump brought up Beyoncé and Jay Z yet again at his rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Monday afternoon. He criticized the language at Clinton’s event, and then said he would not “even address the words because if I do, the crooked media will say, ‘Did you hear what Donald Trump said today?’”
The crowd booed, and the GOP nominee went onto address what Jay Z and Beyoncé had said anyway.
“Those words were disgusting,” he said.
Trump later claimed that people left Clinton’s rally because of the language. “When the performance was done, there weren’t too many people in the room,” he told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning. “She would have been better off not having them. I’m filling up rooms just on the basis of what I’m saying.”
This article has been updated with Trump’s comments at his rally in Raleigh and also on “Fox & Friends.”
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.
