In Donald Trump’s world, an “eye for an eye” doesn’t quite cut it. His calculus is much more severe — even a modest political jab or unflattering piece of reporting is likely to be met with unrelenting force.
Trump met criticism from his Republican opponents with mocking nicknames and scornful insults. But it didn’t stop there. Using the same tactics with reporters, he has often responded to tough or probing questions — as he did during a fraught exchange on Tuesday — with angry, often personal, attacks.
Here are some of his most pointed reprisals.
Calls reporter a ‘sleaze’
Trump gathered the media at New York’s Trump Tower on Tuesday to provide information and answer questions about his fundraising for veterans groups. But the presumptive Republican nominee soon maligned the press for not offering what he considered to be proper credit for his charitable giving.
ABC News reporter Tom Llamas called out Trump for exaggerating the initial totals.
“Mr. Trump, writing a $1 million check is incredibly generous, but the night of the Iowa fundraiser, you said you had raised $6 million,” Llamas began. “Clearly you had not. Your critics say you tend to exaggerate, you have a problem with the truth. Is this a prime example?”
Trump immediately rejected the math, saying he expected the number would eventually surpass $6 million, then turned on Llamas, eventually calling him “a sleaze.”
When a reporter asked if a Trump presidency would take on a similar tone, the billionaire businessman responded, “Yeah, it is going to be like this.”
“You think I’m going to change?” he said. “I’m not going to change.”
References judge’s ‘Mexican’ heritage
After U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel ordered the since-shuttered Trump University’s “playbooks” to be made public, the candidate and his allies launched a series of attacks centered on Curiel’s Latino background.
“This should have been dismissed on summary judgment easily, everybody says it. But I have judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said on Friday in San Diego, saying Curiel is “we believe, Mexican, which is great.”
On Monday, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson suggested on CNN’s “New Day” that Curiel’s membership in La Raza Lawyer’s Association made him biased and tried to tie him to anti-Trump protesters.
Slams conservative opponent Bill Kristol
On Sunday, Trump began a now days-long offensive against Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, a Never-Trumper who has been recruiting a conservative third-party challenger.
“If dummy Bill Kristol actually does get a spoiler to run as an independent, say goodbye to the Supreme Court!” Trump tweeted over the weekend, before doubling down at his press conference Tuesday, when he labeled Kristol a “loser,” “not a smart person” and “such a fool.”
Elizabeth Warren as ‘Pocahontas’
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has recently sought to match Trump’s Twitter fire, using some of the same harsh language he has made a staple of the campaign. Trump has responded in kind and upped the ante — repeatedly calling her “Pocahontas,” a reference to the 2012 controversy over her claimed Native American heritage.
Since Warren emerged as one of his chief antagonists, Trump has been unyielding in his attacks.
“I find it offensive that goofy Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas, pretended to be Native American to get in Harvard,” he tweeted last week. (Warren, a former Harvard professor, noted in her response that she did not attend the college as a student.) Trump in March interrupted a reporter trying to ask a question about Warren, asking sarcastically, “Who’s that, the Indian? You mean the Indian?”
Repeated attacks on Megyn Kelly
Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has been targeted repeatedly by Trump after she asked a pointed question about his past remarks regarding women at the first GOP debate last August. Initially retweeting supporters who called her a “bimbo” and other offensive terms, Trump dialed it up a couple days later.
“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon during an interview about the exchange. “Blood coming out of her wherever.”
Trump has launched sporadic volleys of invective against Kelly in the months that followed, calling her “crazy” and calling for a “boycott” of her show.
The current detente followed a private meeting and then an interview special, but not before Fox News put out a press release labeling Trump’s “sick obsession” with Kelly as being “beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land.”
Turning on Ted Cruz
It seems like a while back now, but Trump and his since-vanquished primary rival Ted Cruz began the political season in a rather chummy pose. The Texas senator refrained from criticizing the billionaire businessman even as Trump mocked John McCain last July for having been captured and held as POW during the Vietnam War.
During debates, Cruz mostly kept his distance from the front-runner, repeatedly dodging opportunities to poke him. But as the campaign heated up and the field dwindled, Cruz went on the attack.
Trump’s response was devastating. Cruz quickly became “Lyin’ Ted” and, before it was all over, Trump had threatened to “spill the beans” on the senator’s wife and peddled a conspiracy theory linking his father to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.