Donald Trump The Friars Club Honors Larry King - P 2012
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As election day nears, realty reality czar Donald Trump has been ramping up his campaign to get President Barack Obama out of the White House.
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On Thursday, Trump — whose tireless backing of Mitt Romney is actually pushing voters towards Obama, according to a recent THR/Penn Schoen Berland poll — tweeted to his 1.75 million followers, “Obama is a terrible negotiator. He bails out Chrysler and now Chrysler wants to send all Jeep manufacturing to China — and will!”
That assertion drew a very un-corporate-speak response from Chrysler Group vice president for product design Ralph Gilles: “@realDonaldTrump you are full of shit!” It proved a popular retort, earning over 4,000 retweets and 2,700 favorites.
Gilles later issued a follow-up tweet: “I apologize for my language, but lies are just that, lies. Thanks for the support People.”
Trump’s comments about Jeep refer to a new Romney campaign ad running in northwest Ohio which asserts that GM and Chrysler are outsourcing auto jobs to China at the expense of workers at their Ohio plants. Chrysler Group chief executive Sergio Marchionne issued a statement on Tuesday in which he felt “obliged to unamibiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China.”
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The heated Trump-Gilles exchange comes on the tail of the Celebrity Apprentice star’s latest political stunt — an offer of $5 million paid to the charity of the president’s choosing in exchange for his college transcripts and passport records. The offer was taken off the table on Thursday at the proposed noon deadline.
The money “could have provided substantial aid to a variety of great causes, including the victims of Hurricane Sandy,” the Celebrity Apprentice star said, adding, “Obviously [Obama] wasn’t born in this country or, if he was, he said he wasn’t in order to receive financial aid and in order to have a clear and very easy path into a college or university. Only a very stupid person would believe otherwise.”
Trump gave no further indication of whether or not any of the $5 million would still wind up going to Hurricane Sandy relief, though he did tweet his intention to send “lots of bottled water out to Staten Island & Long Island.”
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