Republican front-runner Donald Trump continued to double down on Fox News star Megyn Kelly on Monday, saying that he is the one who deserves an apology from her — not the other way around — because of the question she threw him during last Thursday's GOP debate and the way she reacted to his answer.
"The fact is she asked me a very inappropriate question," Trump told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "She should be apologizing to me if you want to know the truth."
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During the first prime-time GOP debate, Kelly was visibly angry after Trump responded "just Rosie O'Donnell" when she asked him a question about calling women names in the past.
On Friday night,
Trump told CNN that "you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever," leading critics to say Trump was referring to Kelly's menstrual cycle.
Trump turned away a question on Monday over whether he'd talked to anybody at Fox News about finding common cause, but insisted that he doesn't think the network treats him well.
"I'm not going to embarrass anybody," Trump told MSNBC. "My whole life has been led on the theory that I do not want to embarrass people."
Trump said he doesn't understand why he wasn't treated well by Fox, but still, he's at the top of the polls and maybe he should just leave matters the way they were.
"Virtually every poll has said I won the debate," he told host Joe Scarborough, who had said earlier in the morning that he did not think the real estate magnate did well in the debates.
"I don't understand how you can say that, because I actually felt — and especially in light of horrible questions I was being asked, they didn't ask me about jobs," said Trump. "They didn't ask me about the economy."
From the debate's very beginning, when Trump raised his hand to a Bret Baier question about considering a third-party campaign, to Kelly's question on name calling, Trump said he found much of the Fox News moderators' questions inappropriate.
"Then Megyn gets up and starts talking gibberish and asks a stupid question," he said. "This whole thing happened because the question was really a very unfair one."
He said many of the candidates told him they thought it was unfair; in fact, "everyone thought that."
But, Trump insisted Monday that he had not had a chance to finish his statement on CNN Friday night, and if he had, he would "have said nose and ears because it's a very common thing when you say blood pouring out of the nose, eyes, ears — but then I wanted to get onto jobs and so I didn't actually even finish the statement."
Then on Saturday, he found out "total lightweight"
Erick Erickson from Red State had dropped him from his event in Atlanta that same day.
"He's a loser," said Trump."He doesn't back winners. He's a guy that's truly to be considered a lightweight. He disinvited me. I saved a fortune on fuel. He disinvited me to something that wasn't a big deal.
"By the way, the people that were there went nuts when they found out I was disinvited ... he disinvited me to get publicity. But it worked out and I had a semi-free evening, which wasn't so bad."
However, Trump refused to directly answer a question from "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski about women's issues, including equal pay and helping women gain access to capital.
"This is the kind of question I should have been asked," he told her, promising that he would be "the best for women's health issues," before returning to talking about his statistics and drawing viewers to watch the debate.
When Brzezinski pressed the question, Trump said that he wasn't going to answer the question on the show, as he wants to "discussion those questions at a debate. All I can say is on women's issues and women's health issues, there will be nobody better than Donald Trump. I'll come out with policy on that and make it in the future."
But he did answer questions on dealing with the Islamic State terror group, calling the insurgents "mad people" who "have to be taken seriously," including reintroducing ground forces.
"Every place where they have oil, I would knock the hell out of them and I would put boots on the ground in those areas," Trump said.
"I would take the oil," he said. "What you're doing is you're cutting off a big portion of their money source. The other part of their money source happens to be banks. Money is flowing in through banks in Saudi Arabia and other places. You have to cut that off.
If president, "I would knock out the source of their wealth."