Trump claims he barely knew Alicia Machado and also saved her job
Donald Trump is still talking about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and what he’s saying is still not “I’m sorry.” Trump talked to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly Wednesday night, and tried to make himself out to be the hero who stepped in to defend Machado, despite barely even having met her:
"I’ll bet you if you put up and added up all the time I spoke to her, it was probably less than five minutes," he said. “I had nothing to do with this person, but they wanted to fire her. I saved her job because I said, 'That’s gonna be ruinous.' And I’ve done that with a number of the young ladies, where I saved their job."
“I had nothing to do with” the young woman I forced to work out in front of a room full of reporters. “All the time I spoke to her, it was probably less than five minutes”—against the series of detailed stories Machado has told about her interactions with Trump.
But about Trump’s claim that “I’ve done that with a number of the young ladies, where I saved their job." The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story about the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, and specifically about allegations in a labor lawsuit.
"I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were 'not pretty enough' and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women,” Hayley Strozier, who was director of catering at the club until 2008, said in a sworn declaration.
Initially, Trump gave this command “almost every time” he visited, Strozier said. Managers eventually changed employee schedules “so that the most attractive women were scheduled to work when Mr. Trump was scheduled to be at the club," she said.
Doesn’t that sound a little more like Donald Trump than “I saved her job”? Also, women who served Trump got creeped on, with one woman saying he made her “uncomfortable” with “inappropriate” behavior. And this is all from a lawsuit about meal and rest breaks, not harassment or discrimination!
So, yeah. Trump’s treatment of Alicia Machado—as she reports it—is well in line with how he’s treated other women who work for him. Like the creeping misogynist boor he is.