New Hampshire Union Leader Publisher Joe McQuaid brushed off Donald Trump's attacks on his newspaper and himself on Tuesday, saying that there is "absolutely" no truth in the claims the front-runner has been making about him.
"The guy makes up stuff as he goes along," McQuaid told MSNBC's
"Andrea Mitchell Reports" program.
Trump went into attack mode Monday after McQuaid posted a front-page editorial in his newspaper earlier in the day that ridiculed him and
compared him to "Biff," the bully in the "Back to the Future" movies.
"He's a real lowlife, no question about it," Trump said of McQuaid in an interview with New Hampshire TV station
WMUR. "This man is absolutely terrible," Trump said, piling on by adding, "He's just a bad guy. He's in my opinion a very dishonest man."
Trump also went after McQuaid's newspaper, once known as a conservative political powerhouse, which recently
endorsed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the GOP nomination over Trump.
"The Union Leader used to be a great paper. Now it is a small fraction of itself," Trump said, saying the publication "is failing."
Later in the evening, at a rally in New Hampshire, Trump continued his attack, calling McQuaid "Christie's lapdog."
"He endorses Christie and that was okay," Trump said Monday. "I figured that was going to happen because when he called me up couple of months ago, to see if I can get Christie on to the main stage, I said 'I think he's going to endorse Christie, right, why would he be doing that.'
"The first time I met with him, he said I'll never endorse Christie and the reason he said that, he hated that Christie embraced Obama so strongly before the election, right before the election."
McQuaid on Tuesday, though, laughed off Trump's accusations.
"History repeats itself," he said. "Thirty-two years ago, a guy named Ed Muskie pulled up in front of the Union Leader and said William Loeb was a liar and said he didn't walk, he crawled. I'm trying to figure out, just ask the guy in the studio, whether a lowlife is better than a crawler or a walker and how he gets around."
Trump is leading in the polls, but McQuaid said that makes no difference to him, as he thinks the polls are "pretty much bunk" and based on name recognition, not substance.
"It's a crowded field and I think Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina are going to win over the field, and all this poll business is going to be history, past history," said McQuaid.
The reaction in New Hampshire has been mixed, the publisher continued.
"There are some Trump supporters, and most of them appear to have commented online under the editorial and said we were some sort of dog excrement, which was kind of nice, but we have also gotten quite a bit of support, summed up in 'it's about time somebody called this guy out.'"
Further, McQuaid denied Trump's claims that he ever said he had ruled out Christie for any reason.
"Trump also said that there were different reasons why I wrote that editorial, and one was because I was upset that he didn't do a voters' forum that we had last August," said McQuaid, denying that there was any truth to that.
"We mentioned in this morning's paper two letters that he sent," said McQuaid. "One was just before the event in which he said he had a great business sense and his sense was that we weren't going to endorse him and therefore, he wasn't going to do our event. Well, he was right about that. He had a good sense. We didn't endorse him."
But a day after the event, said McQuaid, Trump said, "'Dear Joe, your event sucked, everybody said so, they said I was really smart not to do it, and by the way, when you get around to it, please endorse me.'"
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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