Donald Trump says he doesn't owe Megyn Kelly an apology for "blood" remarks: "What I said was appropriate"

Anyone who interpreted his "blood coming out of her wherever" remark to mean menstruation is "a deviant"

Published August 10, 2015 12:58PM (EDT)

  (AP/John Minchillo)
(AP/John Minchillo)

Over the weekend and right on into this morning, Donald Trump continued to insist that his demeaning comments about Megyn Kelly's "blood coming out of her wherever" was not a reference to menstruation, but to the fact that she had figurative blood coming out of her nose during last week's presidential debate, adding that anyone who interpreted his remarks otherwise is a "deviant."

Monday on Today, he told Savannah Guthrie that his statement wasn't even intended "to be much of an insult," noting that, hypothetically, "if I had said that, it would have been inappropriate." The conditional acknowledgment of his non-apology aside, Trump claimed that he "didn't even finish the answer, because I wanted to get on the next point."

"If I finished it," he said, "I was going to say ears or nose, because that's just a common statement -- blood is pouring out of your ears." Google doesn't agree with Trump about the commonplace nature of that statement -- the majority of results returned for variations of the phrase involve a fairly dire medical emergency -- but any explanation is preferable to the obvious one for the Trump campaign at this point.

The entire controversy is, from Trump's perspective, just another instantiation of the pervasive, pernicious presence of political correctness in American culture. As he told Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" yesterday -- and as he's tweeted about repeatedly since Erick Erickson canceled his appearance at Red State's conservative forum on Saturday -- "political correctness is killing our country."

"You can't say anything. Anything you say today, they will find a reason why it's not good. I think we have to get back to work as a country," he argued.

His definition of "political correctness" is unsurprisingly broad, encompassing everything from his ability to call losers "losers" to calling out "ugly" people on their ugliness. They would do the same, he told Todd, but "it’s very hard for them to attack me on looks because I’m so good-looking."

According to the latest "NBC News/Survey Monkey poll, the real estate mogul still possesses a healthy lead in the polls, although Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz have both been surging since their performances on Thursday.

Watch Trump's appearance on "Meet the Press" below via NBC News.


By Scott Eric Kaufman

MORE FROM Scott Eric Kaufman


Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Donald Trump Elections 2016 Feminism Fox News Megyn Kelly Misogyny