Hillary Clinton had an effective moment in Monday night’s presidential debate in which she brought up Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan woman who won Trump’s Miss Universe contest in 1996 and who says Trump called her “Miss Piggy” because of her weight and “Miss Housekeeping” because she is Latina. Trump appeared unprepared to discuss Machado during the debate and, Tuesday morning on Fox and Friends, dug his hole a little/lot deeper by insisting that Machado had it coming:
TRUMP: At the end, maybe, the very last question, when she brought up the person that became—I know that person, that person was a Miss Universe person, and she was the worst we ever had. The worst, the absolute worst. She was impossible, and she was a Miss Universe contestant and ultimately a winner who they had a tremendously difficult time with as Miss Universe.
SOME FOX HACK: Did not know that story.
ANOTHER FOX STOOGE: Wow, I didn’t know either.
TRUMP: She was the winner, and, you know, she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem. Not only that, her attitude, and we had a real problem with her, so Hillary went back into the years and she found this girl. This was many years ago, and found the girl and talked about her like she was Mother Teresa and it wasn’t quite that way, but that’s OK.
Here’s an excerpt one of Trump’s books in which he complains about Machado sitting “plumply” in the Miss Universe greenroom:
It looks like we might have a real “Thing that Trump can’t let go and keeps talking about for days even as his advisers beg him to stop and his poll numbers plummet” situation on our hands here.
