Democratic VP nominee Kaine in Austin blasts Trump’s gun remark.
Clinton’s VP pick on fundraising swing in Texas
AUSTIN — Donald Trump’s suggestion that gun-rights enthusiasts might be able to keep Hillary Clinton from appointing high court justices shows him to be a “complete temperamental misfit” for the presidency, Clinton’s running mate said Tuesday.
“Nobody who is seeking a leadership position, especially the presidency, the leadership of the country, should do anything to countenance violence, and that’s what he was saying,” Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine said during a Texas fundraising swing.
The campaign hopes to raise more than $1 million through events in Austin on Tuesday and in Dallas and Fort Worth on Wednesday, according to one source familiar with campaign plans.
Kaine carried Clinton’s focus on the economy, children, unity and character to a volunteer appreciation event Tuesday, but the day’s campaign story line was quickly overshadowed by Trump’s comments at a Wilmington, N.C., rally.
The Republican presidential nominee contended there that Clinton “wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment.”
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump added. “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
The authority of the next president to appoint at least one and possibly several U.S. Supreme Court justices who will make decisions on gun rights and other issues is a key element of the race for president.
Trump’s remark was widely seen as a threat. Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller responded to that interpretation with a statement headlined, “Trump Campaign Statement on Dishonest Media.”
“It’s called the power of unification,” Miller said, adding that Second Amendment supporters “have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power. And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won’t be for Hillary Clinton. It will be for Donald Trump.”
Kaine, a U.S. senator from Virginia, told reporters that the Trump campaign is “trying to row back” its candidate’s comments but that he didn’t find the attempt persuasive.
“There is a beautiful phrase in the Gospel of Luke that says, ‘From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.’ What comes out often reveals something really important about who you are, and I think Donald Trump revealed again … a complete temperamental misfit with the character that’s required to do the job,” Kaine said.
Kaine talked to reporters after speaking at a volunteer appreciation event that preceded his fundraiser, telling a crowd in an unairconditioned building at the Travis County Democratic coordinated campaign office that Texas is “critically important.”
Texas Democrats are holding out hope that they can do better in this presidential race than they have in decades thanks to controversy stirred by Trump. The last time a Democratic presidential candidate lost to a Republican by single digits in Texas was the Bill Clinton-Bob Dole race in 1996, when Ross Perot got nearly 7 percent of the vote.
A June internet-based survey showed Clinton within single digits of Trump in Texas — and that was before the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
Kaine said he and Clinton “are serious about Texas” and encouraged volunteers to focus on personal contact that he said is more persuasive than advertising.