Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday blamed the media for misinterpreting Donald Trump’s incendiary remarks about the ability of “Second Amendment people” to take action against Hillary Clinton.
“What he said very clearly was that if Hillary Clinton were elected president, she would get to appoint judges to the Supreme Court, and among the other things that they would do to destroy us, would be to do away with the Second Amendment and your right to bear arms,” Giuliani said while introducing Trump at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina.
“Now, is there anybody here that doubts that?” he asked the audience.
“And then he said, ‘And you have the power to do something about it,’” Giuliani went on. “And what he meant by that was you have the power to vote against her. You have the power to campaign against her. You have the power to speak against her. You know why, because you’re Americans.”
This line of defense, which others in the Trump camp have offered up, ignores the fact that the Republican nominee was explicitly talking about what would happen after Clinton won the election. Earlier Tuesday at the University of North Carolina, Trump said that if Clinton were able to select liberal Supreme Court justices as president, there would be nothing Americans could do to prevent her from taking away their right to own firearms.
“Though the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” he said.
By the time the former secretary of state would be nominating Supreme Court judges, she would already be sitting in the Oval Office. Voters motivated by their support for gun rights would have lost their bid to stop the Democratic nominee at the polls.
Giuliani insisted that the press was sensationalizing Trump’s comments to suggest that voters could use violence against Clinton.
“To buy that, you have to be corrupt because if you said that to me, I would say to you: ‘Are you out of your mind?'” he said.
Most of the press, Giuliani went on, “is in the tank for Hillary Clinton.”
