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(114,904 posts) Wed Aug 17, 2016, 12:52 PM Aug 2016

Katie Tur: My Crazy Year with Trump

The presidential hopeful has insulted reporter Katy Tur on national TV, called her names during interviews, and made his campaign seemingly impossible to cover. Here, her no-holds-barred account of trailing the most unlikely candidate in GOP history.

In a speech carried live from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on at least three TV networks last December, soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump was telling the world he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. "It's temporary," he later tried to soften. And then I heard my name.

"She's back there. Little Katy. She's back there."

I was six months into covering the Trump campaign for MSNBC and NBC News, and there I was, in the belly of a World War II battleship, in a press pen made out of bicycle racks, surrounded by thousands of whipped-up Trump supporters.

A few days earlier, at another Trump rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, I'd tweeted live as wave after wave of protestors stood up during his speech. "Now 10," I wrote from the scene, counting the interruptions. "Trump ends speech abruptly and leaves stage."

Trump thought my tweets were "disgraceful" and "not nice!" according to a chastising note from his 26-year-old press secretary, Hope Hicks. In the hours that followed, Trump took his complaints public, trashing me and CBS News reporter Sopan Deb for the coverage.

"@KatyTurNBC & @DebSopan [sic] should be fired for dishonest reporting," he tweeted. "@KatyTurNBC, 3rd rate reporter & @SopanDeb @CBS lied."

He demanded I apologize.

I didn't, so Trump decided to go further in Mount Pleasant, pointing his finger squarely at me and launching a personal attack as millions of Americans watched at home.

"What a lie it was," Trump said, referring to the claim that he had left the stage abruptly. "What a lie. Katy Tur. What a lie it was. Third. Rate. Reporter. Remember that." The crowd's boos ricocheted off the iron hull of the USS Yorktown.