As President Donald Trump rallied support for Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore on Friday night, protesters at Trump’s event in Pensacola, Florida used the president’s daughter’s own words against the case he was making for the accused child molester.
Members of the anti-Trump group American Bridge drove past the rally in a truck featuring a billboard emblazoned with Ivanka Trump’s comments about the allegations of Moore’s sexual misconduct.
“There’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children,” read the sign.
The remark was from an interview Ivanka Trump gave to the Associated Press in November after the Washington Post published an explosive story in which four women accused Moore of initiating romantic relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was an adult working as an assistant district attorney.
One of the women said she was 14 when Moore molested her, and the article was followed by an accusation from Beverly Young Nelson, who said Moore had attempted to sexually assault her in a locked car when she was 15.
In the AP interview, Trump added, “I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts.”
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Despite his daughter’s stated objections to Moore’s alleged behavior, Trump, who is also an accused sexual predator, rallied support for the Republican candidate on Friday night, urging audience members to “get out and vote for Roy Moore” in Tuesday’s special election as Republicans “cannot afford to lose a seat in the very, very close United States Senate.”
The president also made a veiled reference to allegations that Nelson forged Moore’s signature in her high school yearbook. The yearbook had been presented by Nelson and her lawyer, Gloria Allred, as evidence that Nelson had known Moore. On Friday Nelson clarified that she had written the date underneath Moore’s signature, provoking Moore supporters’ accusations that she had lied about her contact with him.
“Did you see what happened today, you know, the yearbook? Did you see that?” Trump asked the crowd. “There was a little mistake made, she started writing things in the yearbook…Gloria Allred, anytime you see her, you know something’s going wrong.”
The attempt to discredit Nelson, who is one of nine women who have now come forward alleging that Moore pursued or assaulted them when they were teenagers, was seen by American Bridge as a desperate bid to deflect from the accounts of his misconduct, which have been corroborated by more than two dozen sources.
“Try as Trump and the Republican Party might, there’s no way to escape the truth about Roy Moore or Ivanka Trump’s own words,” American Bridge spokeswoman Allison Teixeira Sulier told the Huffington Post in a statement. “It’s a disgusting new low that the President, the RNC, and the rest of the Republican Party are trying to help send a pedophile to the U.S. Senate, and the American people won’t soon forget it.”
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