'Well, I say to Mr. Trump, what are you afraid of?'
Looks like Donald Trump took a page from Hillary Clinton's
book and chickened out.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee said
Friday afternoon that he would not debate
Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, despite having said one day prior that
he'd "love to debate Bernie."
Sanders' rival for the Democratic nomination said
earlier this week that she would not participate in a debate with
Sanders in California ahead of that state's primary next month, despite having
agreed to do so previously.
Trump's statement,
in full:
Based on the fact that the Democratic nominating process is
totally rigged and Crooked Hillary Clinton and Deborah Wasserman Schultz will
not allow Bernie Sanders to win, and now that I am the presumptive Republican
nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second place finisher.
Likewise, the networks want to make a killing on these events and are not
proving to be too generous to charitable causes, in this case, women’s health
issues. Therefore, as much as I want to debate Bernie Sanders - and it
would be an easy payday - I will wait to debate the first place finisher in the
Democratic Party, probably Crooked Hillary Clinton, or whoever it may be.
Speaking with reporters in Los Angeles on Friday, Sanders said
he hoped Trump would have a change of heart.
"I hope that he changes his mind again. Mr. Trump is
known to change his mind many times in a day," Sanders said. "Trump
is a bully, he's a big tough guy. Well, I say to Mr. Trump, what are you afraid
of?"
In a
statement, the Vermont senator alluded to why Trump—whom Sanders
consistently trounces in polls—might not want to face him head-on:
There is a reason why in virtually every national and
statewide poll I am defeating Donald Trump, sometimes by very large margins and
almost always by far larger margins than Secretary Clinton. There is a reason
for that reality and the American people should be able to see it up front in a
good debate and a clash of ideas.
Alas, wrote
David A. Graham at The Atlantic, "the Queens-Brooklyn accent showdown
would have been tremendous."
People were tweeting under the hashtag #ChickenTrump:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Share This Article
No comments:
Post a Comment