Trump Takes Parting Shot at Beto O'Rourke: 'He Quit Like a Dog'
President Donald Trump on Friday took a parting shot at former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who had announced earlier in the day he was ending his floundering campaign for the White House.
“When Beto quit like — he quit like a dog,” Trump said Friday during a rally in Tupelo, Mississippi. “When he quit I said, ‘See, people think this is easy, this isn’t easy.'”
“He was a nasty guy. He had a couple of policies that don’t work well in the state of Texas. He was against religion. He was against you having a gun, and he was against oil,” Trump said of the former Texas congressman, according to the New York Post.
O’Rourke had repeatedly attacked Trump during the course of his presidential campaign, and recently likened Trump to Adolf Hitler.
“Outside of the Third Reich, give me another example of a Western leader who has called people of one faith inherently defective or dangerous or disqualified from being successful in that country,” O’Rourke said in an interview with The Washington Post’s Robert Costa.
Trump had initially responded to O’Rourke’s departure from the campaign with a chortling tweet referring to a March interview in which O’Rourke talked about running for president and said he was “born” to do it.
“Oh no, Beto just dropped out of race for President despite him saying he was ‘born for this.’ I don’t think so!” Trump tweeted.
Oh no, Beto just dropped out of race for President despite him saying he was “born for this.” I don’t think so!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2019
Trump returned to the subject in Mississippi on Friday.
“Oh did you hear? Beto,” Trump said, repeating O’Rourke’s name several times. “Oh that poor bastard. Poor, pathetic guy. He was pathetic.”
Trump made fun of O’Rourke’s speaking and gesturing style:
“I noticed he was flailing with the arms,” Trump said. “He was standing on tables. He was standing on countertops. I said, ‘Does he ever, like, stand on the floor and speak?’ But he’s waving his arms and going crazy, and I said, ‘What the hell is [he] doing? What is he on?’”
Trump also added another comment about O’Rourke’s claim that he was born to run for president.
“He said that he was born for it. Like he was born from Heaven, he came down,” Trump said as he looked upward, adding, “Some really bad things happened because he made a total fool out of himself.”
Trump then delivered his bottom line on O’Rourke, who at one point in his campaign proposed a so-called mandatory “buyback” of AR-15s and AK-47s.
“He came out of Texas a very hot political property, and he went back as cold as you can be,” Trump said.
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