Clinton campaign highlights jilted Trump contractors
The Hillary Clinton campaign launched a Facebook Live session Tuesday in which it is reading the names of more than 5,500 lawsuits Donald Trump has been involved in.
The session, which began at noon ET, is part of a broader theme Democrats are hammering in the shadow of the Republican convention this week in Cleveland.
Democratic officials also held a news conference Tuesday in which they shared the stories of contractors who’ve accused Trump of shortchanging them for work that they performed for his business empire.
“When they see what Donald Trump did to contractors and workers,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, “they will definitely be able to identify” and will not vote for him. “Workers didn’t get paid,” said Ryan, who represents Youngstown, Ohio.
Rep. Joseph Crowley cited a Paste BN story quantifying contractors and lawsuits.
The Democratic speakers also hit Trump for outsourcing manufacturing jobs for his clothing and other product lines to India, China and Turkey. “He’s made a career at the expense of everyone else,” said Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman. “We won’t allow Donald Trump to prey on hard-working Americans by giving him the keys to the White House,” she said.
The campaign also released the latest in a series of web videos featuring contractors who say they were stiffed by Trump. It features Mike Diehl, who tells the story of how he ran a music store in New Jersey which sold Trump’s Taj Mahal $100,000 in pianos, but Trump repeatedly refused to pay the bill and eventually forced him to accept 70 cents on the dollar.
“The people that got hurt in Atlantic City are honest, hardworking people just like me,” says Diehl. “He has no plans of doing anything that’s constructive for anybody, except himself. We’re gonna suffer.”
Earlier this month, Clinton spoke in front of the shuttered Trump Plaza in Atlantic City.
Ryan said many of Trump’s working-class supporters do not know his business record because his Republican primary challengers failed to highlight it. “No one even laid a glove on this guy. No one even talked about these issues,” he said.