It’s hard to decide which part of Donald Trump’s Monday afternoon press conference in Washington was the most bizarre. There was the spectacle of holding the event in Trump’s newest hotel, being constructed at a D.C. landmark, the Old Post Office Building. The sound system helped Trump’s voice echo through the cavernous, 10-story lobby. “That’s a brand new floor,” Trump told members of the press as he gestured to the ground beneath our feet. “In about a week it gets covered with marble, beautiful marble from different parts of the world.”
There was the post-press conference tour, led by Trump himself, of the hotel’s new ballroom (“By far the most luxurious ballroom in Washington”). The scrum of reporters and TV cameras squeezed through small passageways on the construction site to follow him as Trump explained to Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin the details of the renovation work on the building’s exterior, including black stone and cherry wood. “Every hotel company in the world wanted this,” Trump said.
“It’s incredible real estate,” Halperin admitted.
There was even the prominent placement of R. Emmett Tyrrell, the editor of the conservative magazine The American Spectator, in the front row. Trump, through his foundation, has donated $25,000 to the Spectator, and in 2013 the magazine awarded Trump with its T. Boone Pickens Entrepreneur Award (as reported by Jeffrey Lord, who has since become one of the most prominent Trump backers in conservative media and on CNN).
But perhaps the most baffling moment came during the press conference itself when Trump called on a young woman wearing Trump campaign press credentials. The woman, Alicia Watkins, told Trump she was a 9/11 survivor and Iraq War veteran and that she “loves the policy that you have for the military.” Watkins then asked if the hotel would be hiring veterans. “We are doing some of that already,” Trump replied. “Why, what are you looking for?”
Before she could answer, Trump said, “Come on, come up here.” Watkins left her seat and approached Trump’s podium. “Do you mind if I do a job interview right now? We need good people,” he said. “So what’s your experience, in front of the world?”
Watkins said she does “designs and decorations,” and that was enough for Trump. “If we can make a good deal on the salary, she’s going to probably have a job,” he said, pointing Watkins toward one of his hotel managers.
Asked by ABC News’s Tom Llamas about the strange decision to offer this woman a job in the middle of the press conference, Trump said he “felt good about her.”
“You know, I have gut instinct,” Trump said. “And I looked at her, and she asked a question, and it was a very positive question. She looks like she’s got a great—look, look at that with the tears. How nice. She’s just a good, she just seemed like a good person to me. Just seemed like a good person to me. Now, maybe she won’t qualify because you have to qualify, but I think she will. I think she, to me, looked like a good person. I have instincts about people.”
Afterward, Watkins said she was given press credentials to the event because she does freelance work for a news organization called either “Troop Media” or “Troops Media.” (She was not consistent when asked for the publication’s name.) The URL she offered, troopsmedia.com, leads to an “under construction” page. Besides a laptop computer, Watkins did not have any materials that looked like they were being used to report on the candidate who had just offered her a job. In fact, during Trump’s tour of the hotel, she seemed to hold a mini-press conference of her own with the journalists who remained behind.
It’s not as if Trump really needed a planted question. The press conference followed a familiar pattern, with Trump calling on his favorite journalists, in some cases (as with Halperin, Llamas, and others) multiple times. There were shades of his insult comic shtick—asked about Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren criticizing Trump earlier on Monday, the GOP frontrunner dismissed her as “the Indian.” Trump made vague threats against those who oppose him.
“They better be careful, and they certainly should be careful with third-party stuff,” said Trump, who had earlier held a meeting with some GOP members of Congress, most of whom have endorsed him. “‘If Trump gets it, we’re going to start a third party.’ Well, a third party means the Democrats are going to win, almost certainly. You can’t be that spiteful.”
He also claimed many of the Republicans and conservative publicly opposing his nomination “aren’t really against me.” Trump said some Republicans who go on TV to talk about stopping him—he wouldn’t specify who—have spoken to him about meeting with him.
“You have a lot of people out there that you think are against me, and they’re just politicians and they want to make a deal,” Trump said.
The emphasis on how many people in the Republican party, even those who actively oppose him, do in fact support him, led me to ask him during the hotel tour if he feels threatened or concerned about the recent rumblings of finding an independent conservative candidate to run in the general election if Trump wins the nomination.
Trump shook his head at the question and repeated his view that a third party or third major candidate would give the Democrats and Hillary Clinton the election. Does that mean Trump thinks he would lose if a conservative candidate would get in? Trump ignored the question. “We would lose the Supreme Court for 100 years,” he said.
