After numerous embarrassments this week involving women, Donald Trump grudgingly admitted to
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that "it was a mistake" to re-tweet blatantly contrasting pictures of Heidi Cruz and his wife Melania.
"If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have sent it," he told Dowd for a column published on Saturday.
The Twitter post, the columnist said, led her sister to drop her support of Trump.
"It’s ridiculous how many mistakes Trump has made in rapid order to alienate women when he was already on thin ice with them — and this in a year when the Republicans will likely have to run against a woman," she said.
Besides the Cruz fiasco, Dowd noted Trump's flip-flops this week on abortion, the alleged assault last month of a woman journalist by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — even attacks by Hillary Clinton and Rosie O'Donnell — and his unending slams of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.
"Give me a break, Rosie" Trump told the columnist when she said that the former "The View" host recently compared him to a Harry Potter villain.
"I won’t comment on Rosie. I wish her the best.
"See? In the old days …," he told Dowd. "Tell your sister, I’m making progress."
Trump also said "I think I’d probably do" an interview with Kelly.
She then asked the developer, "How he could possibly win with 73 percent of women in this country turned off by him?"
"He chose another poll," Dowd wrote, "murmuring, 'It was 68 percent, actually.'"
"Trump doesn’t have a plan to turn it around with women," the columnist argued, "except to use [daughter] Ivanka as a character witness and to chant that 'nobody respects women more than I do.'"
"I’m just going to be myself," she quoted the candidate as saying. "That’s all I can do."
Dowd ended with Trump's own words on whether he could be more "presidential":
"There are a lot of people who say, 'Don’t change.' I can be as presidential as anybody who ever lived. I can be so presidential if I want."
"Then start," she concluded.
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