Former Bush official: Trump could be economic ‘disaster’

With the “liberal media” narrative a fail-safe tactic in the GOP playbook, Manafort suggested that the media should take Trump’s secondary explanations for his comments as fact-but didn’t explain why Tapper and the wider media should seemingly downplay the initial comments that spark outrage.

The host went on to stress that many people beyond reporters – including Trump supporters and other Republicans – interpreted Trump’s comments the same way.

Manafort doubled-down on the Trump campaign’s official line on the offending remark, and tried to neutralize the issue by invoking Clinton’s 2008 gaffe regarding her then-primary challenger Barack Obama and the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. “And.chose to do that instead”.

Manafort said that they covered the messages that Trump has been giving for one day, “and you covered this aside about the Second Amendment for three days”.

“Okay, first of all, as a factual matter, on Monday my show covered Mr. Trump’s speech”. I actually think that Hillary Clinton has the experience. So these things, just because you say them, they’re not true. “There’s not a comparison here”. You had a number of things that were appropriate to this campaign, were part of what Mr. Trump has been talking about. “His comments about the Second Amendment had nothing to do with why we weren’t covering the economic message?” “I am afraid of what Donald Trump would do to this country”.

He’s also alarmed by how David Duke is running for Congress “under Trump’s platform”. “I would have preferred Jeb Bush, but I think Hillary is a great choice”, he said on CNN. “He is under audit, when the audit is completed, he’ll release his returns”, Manafort maintained.

This week, Trump New York campaign co-chair Carl Paladino said the Khan family did not deserve the title of a “Gold Star” family, a comment which was strongly condemned from all sides of the political aisle.

“We’ve got an un-indicted felon as his opponent and you’re talking about Khan, about him making a remark about this man”, Paladino, a former NY gubernatorial candidate, told interviewer Connell McShane on Imus in the Morning.

“Mr. Khan supports this ISIS-type attitude against America”, Paladino had said, though there is no evidence of that. And that led straight into Tapper’s withering goodbye: “Mr. Paladino, your NY co-chair, is attacking a Gold Star family”.

MANAFORT: Jake, we’ve been talking about these messages all week.

“You didn’t address the question at all, but that’s all the time we have”, Tapper said.