Donald Trump spoke to Maureen Dowd of The New York Times in one interview and Chris Wallace of Fox News in another.
Speaking to Dowd, Trump admitted that instead of his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski attempting to smear the reputation of Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields (as Trump also did) after Fields asked for an apology, an apology would have been a better alternative.
He allowed, “Yeah, it was a mistake. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have sent it.”
One might surmise that the only reason Trump was sorry was the blowback from the affair, rather than a sudden qualm of moral conscience. That inference would be bolstered by Trump’s interview with Wallace, in which Wallace questioned Trump about his nasty retweet targeting Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi. That exchange went like this:
Wallace: You talk about the fact that you’ve only been a politician for eight months, but there are other issues that you that you’ve gotten in trouble on in the last week or so that have more to do with just judgment and temperament. For instance, the fact that you spent days going after Ted Cruz’s wife., her looks –
Trump: Excuse me, excuse me. Ted Cruz came after me.
Wallace: No, he didn’t.
Trump: Well, he did through my wife.
Wallace, firmly: No, he didn’t.
Trump: He took a picture –
Wallace: No, he didn’t.
Trump: Of course he did. Of course he did.
Wallace: Do you have any evidence that he knew about the attack by the independent Super-PAC?
Trump: My evidence is total common sense. He knew those people; those people are one hundred percent for them; they coordinated together, I have no doubt about it in a million years; he did that attack, and this –
Wallace, dropping his supposed devotion to the truth for a moment: Even if he did, was it worth spending that amount of time on it?
Trump: No, I would say, I would say probably not. If I had to do it again I probably wouldn’t have sent it. I didn’t think it was particularly bad, but I probably wouldn’t have sent it. But this was a response, this wasn’t me starting something. This was a response.
Trump’s repeated lying about Cruz’s involvement, his claim that his supposed facts are based on his “common sense,” his statement that the retweet “wasn’t particularly bad,” all testify to the candidate’s view of the world.