GOP nominee Donald Trump on Monday denied reports that he is changing his stance on illegal immigrants following his
weekend meeting with national Hispanic leaders, flatly saying he is "not flip-flopping."
"These are great people," Trump told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" about his meeting Saturday with Hispanic leaders from nearly a dozen states. "Highly respected people in the community. Unbelievable people."
But that doesn't mean he's changed his mind on how he wants to deal with immigrants.
"We are dealing with people," Trump said. "We have to be very firm. We have to be very, very strong when people come in illegally. We have a lot of people that want to come in through the legal process and it's not fair for them. We're working with a lot of people in the Hispanic community to try and come up with an answer."
According to a recent
Fox News poll, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads Trump by 46 percentage points among Latino voters.
Trump took particular offense to an article in
Buzzfeed detailing the meeting, which claimed Trump indicated a reversal in his tough stance against illegal immigration. Three sources told the website that in the meeting, Trump suggested he wants to figure out a "humane and efficient" manner for dealing with people in the United States illegally.
"We want to come up with a really fair, but firm answer," Trump insisted Monday.
Also in the interview,
Trump spoke out about Clinton's claims that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had told her to use a personal email server. Powell over the weekend said Clinton had been using the server for a year before they spoke to each other about it.
"Look, she's a liar," Trump said about Clinton. "She lied about the email, she lied about Colin Powell. I saw that, he was not happy. And it's, the whole thing is a scam with them. Everything is a scam. Like grifters."
He also called the news that Clinton's close aide Huma Abedin had ties to a
radical Muslim journal, where her mother remains as editor-in-chief, "terrible."
"It's a lie, another lie they tell," said Trump. "But what about the fact that Huma Abedin who knows every single thing about Hillary Clinton, she knows more about Hillary than Hillary knows and she's married to a pervert sleaze named Anthony Weiner, who will send anything out over Twitter. She's married to Anthony Weiner. She knows everything that Hillary Clinton is doing. She's married to a guy who has no control over himself."
He also downplayed a
New York Times story from the weekend that reported 30 of his properties have $650 million in debt.
"If the value is $11 billion, it's a very small amount of debt," said Trump. "I have very little debt relative to the assets. I guess they said the two assets they were talking about, they went out and did an appraisal. $3.7 billion. That's put down on the little line. Compared to my assets, I think I have less than 5 percent or so in debt, which is a very low debt. Now, the smart people that read that story thought it was a good story. Some people didn't understand the story, but when you get to $300 million or $600 million, but you have massive buildings and big assets that's a very small amount of money. I have very little debt."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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