Donald Trump’s lies and misstatements are so frequent that now it’s news when the Republican presidential candidate actually tells the truth. It seems Trump never actually kicked a baby out of his rally after all and he is right to blame the media for mischaracterizing the entire incident. “This is a situation when the video can lie—and Trump’s odd sense of humor can backfire,” explains the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.
In order to reach that conclusion, Kessler relies in large part on the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale, who was sitting behind the woman whose baby was crying and saw everything up close. Dale wrote about what he witnessed:
The baby was one row in front of me, three or four rows from the stage, at Trump’s event at a high school in Ashburn, Va. When it began to cry, Trump said, “Don’t worry about that baby, I love babies. I love babies. I hear that baby crying, I like it. I like it. What a baby, what a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around — don’t worry about it.”
People applauded. One minute later, though, the baby began to cry again. This time, the mother quickly decided to take the baby out of the room. Trump, looking in our direction, appeared to notice that she was on her way to the exit.
And then he said, “Actually, I was only kidding. You can get the baby out of here. That’s all right. Don’t worry. I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking?” He cupped his hand over his eyes to watch her leave. “That’s OK, people don’t understand. That’s OK.”
A joke? Possibly. An insensitive, heartless, ordinary-person-embarrassing remark? Possibly. Trump’s tone is eternally hard to read. But, to my eyes, it certainly was not an ejection — it was an unusually barbed endorsement of the mother’s own decision to depart.
A reason to believe no one was actually kicked out? The woman and the baby were back in the same seat a little while later.
The mother of the baby—Devan Ebert—also says the whole thing was mischaracterized by the press. “All I’m hoping is that Trump personally is aware that I am in agreement with him and stand by the fact that I was never kicked out of the rally,” she said in an email. Earlier in the week, she reportedly wrote a Facebook post praising Trump for his actions at the rally. “I fully support Mr. Trump. I thought he responded very graciously to my child crying and he made a lighthearted moment out of what I usually consider to be stressful,” she allegedly wrote.
