Quotables
Melania Trump's anti-bullying speech raised an obvious question, and Anderson Cooper asked it
Melania Trump gave her first solo campaign speech for husband Donald Trump on Thursday, telling a crowd in the Philadelphia suburbs that if Trump is elected on Tuesday, her mission as first lady would be to combat the scourge of cyberbullying. "We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other," especially online, she said, criticizing the "bad side" of social media. "Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and teenagers," she said, noting that kids are often hurt when they are "made to feel less in looks or intelligence."
On CNN Thursday night, Anderson Cooper said he didn't "know of anybody who would disagree with that," then asked Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway the obvious question: "The reaction from a number of people, mostly her critics, is that her husband is part of the problem — we all know he's made fun of people's looks, of people's intelligence.... If it's not okay for kids to do this, why is it okay for adults, for Donald Trump?" "Well, it's really not okay for anyone to do it with malicious intent," Conway said, pointing out to "the political class" that most of what's on Twitter isn't about politics.
"Doesn't this start at home?" Cooper pressed. "I mean, isn't the problem at her own dinner table?" "No, it's not at her own dinner table," Conway said. "The fact that her husband's running for president and defends himself sometimes, or tweets things out...." Cooper brought up that time Trump belittled Carly Fiorina, then a GOP primary rival. "Talking about Carly Fiorina's face wasn't a counterattack, that was just an attack," he said. "That was just mean." Conway noted that Trump then told Fiorina at a debate that her face was beautiful, adding, "When it comes to Donald Trump, we're constantly just cherry-picking tweets or certain things that he's said, and not looking at the — go look at his entire Twitter feed, go look at the crowds at his rallies." "It's full of this stuff, though," Cooper said. "Yeah, it's full of a lot of things," Conway said, arguing that Cooper is doing a disservice to Melania Trump's message. Watch. Peter Weber