Names and faces
Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump’s pacing, hovering demeanor onstage during an October 2016 presidential debate made her so uncomfortable “my skin crawled.” In her new book, Clinton writes that Trump shadowed her so closely she had to resist shouting out, “Back up you creep, get away from me.” The Democratic presidential nominee recounted her struggle to keep her composure during that pivotal Oct. 9 face-off in St. Louis less than a month before the election. Two days earlier, their bitter campaign was rocked by the release of footage in which Trump bragged aggressively about groping women. During the debate, the 6-foot-3 Trump repeatedly hovered over Clinton, who’s closer to 5 feet 5 inches tall, as she responded to questions. “This is not OK, I thought,” Clinton said in her audio narration of What Happened, set for release Sept. 12. Excerpts of Clinton reading from the book aired Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Clinton recalled, “It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable he was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.” The former secretary of state said she “kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off.”
Former undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson wants to use crowdfunding to raise enough money to buy Twitter so President Donald Trump can’t use it. Wilson opened the fundraiser last week, tweeting: “If Twitter executives won’t shut down Trump’s violence and hate, then it’s up to us. #BuyTwitter #BanTrump.” The GoFundMe page for the fundraiser says Trump’s tweets “damage the country and put people in harm’s way.” As of Wednesday morning, she had raised less than $6,000 of her $1 billion goal to explore options to buy “a significant stake” and champion the proposal at Twitter’s annual shareholder meeting. Twitter declined to comment Wednesday on Wilson’s tweet about seeking to buy the San Francisco company. But, in an emailed statement, White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the low total shows that the American people like the president’s use of Twitter. “Her ridiculous attempt to shut down his first amendment is the only clear violation and expression of hate and intolerance in this equation,” the statement read. Wilson’s identity as a CIA operative was leaked by an official in President George W. Bush’s administration in 2003 in an effort to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, a former diplomat who criticized Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. She left the agency in 2005.