OK, so Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has now been charged with battery against Michelle Fields, a reporter he claims he never touched or met! Look, the police are not going to charge someone without any evidence. But they do have evidence of an eyewitness (Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, who has stood by his account that he saw Lewandowski grab Ms. Fields), as well as surveillance video of the alleged incident.
I have watched various videos of the incident many times–in them one sees Ms Fields is trying to get close to Donald Trump to ask him a question and one can clearly see Mr. Lewandowski reaching out from behind Fields with his left arm, grabbing Mrs. Field’s left arm, and yanking her back towards him & away from Trump. He then continues forward, moving past Ms Fields and following after Trump.
On the day of the incident, sources to the Daily Beast even reported that “Mr. Lewandowski acknowledged to Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, that he did manhandle Fields. Lewandowski’s explanation to Boyle, said these sources, was that he and Fields had never met before and that he didn’t recognize her as a Breitbart reporter, instead mistaking her for an adversarial member of the mainstream media.”‘ (As if his actions would be OK if it was a hostile reporter).
He later would deny he had even touched Fields, and then the Trump folks escalated into full-scale attack mode– casting Fields as an attention seeker and calling her delusional while saying she probably made up the story..
Now the woman was not badly hurt nor was she thrown to the ground– but she never said she was. All she has said was that someone grabbed her arm forcefully, almost knocking her off-balance, and that she spoke to a fellow reporter who witnessed the incident and told her the person who grabbed her was Mr. Lewandowski. Watching the video, it sure does appear it’s Lewandowski who is grabbing her from behind, and after puling her backwards immediately moves past her, which would explain why she didn’t really see who grabbed her.
Anyway my point in bringing up all of this is that once again, Mr. Trump acts reprehensibly. Instead of instructing his overzealous campaign manager to immediately issue an apology to this reporter (wouldn’t a decent person do this?) he essentially calls her a liar and allows his campaign staff to publicly malign the woman’s character, adding insult to injury. Had they apologized by acknowledging the campaign manager overstepped his bounds in his efforts to shield Mr. Trump, my guess is the reporter probably would have let it go. After all, she did not look or sound like she’d been badly hurt, just a little shaken at being manhandled. By instead attacking her character and motives they practically guaranteed she would press charges. Apologies are not Mr. Trump’s style– which should give pause to all –because it reveals that he continues the pattern of attacking people he perceives as enemies and justifying plainly wrong acts by claiming others started it/deserve it. These are the actions of a childish bully.
ReformingChristianity.com 