President Trump at a rally on Tuesday night mocked testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, one of the women accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.
“36 years ago, this happened,” Trump said at the rally in Mississippi, referring to the party in 1982 where Ford alleges Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.
Trump then launched into a mocking imitation of Ford as she testified at last week’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, prompting applause and laughter from the audience.
“‘How did you get home?'” Trump said. “‘I don’t remember.’ ‘How’d you get there?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Where is the place?’ I don’t remember.’ ‘How many years ago was it?’ ‘I don’t know.'”
“‘What neighborhood was it in?'” he continued, as the crowd cheered and clapped. “‘I don’t know.’ ‘Where’s the house?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Upstairs, downstairs, where was it?’ ‘I don’t know, but I had one beer.’ ‘That’s the only thing I remember.'”
Trump’s statements were a sharp departure from his comments on Friday, where he referred to Ford’s testimony as “very compelling.”
Kavanaugh has unequivocally denied Ford’s allegation and provided his calendars from the period, which do not show the party she described.
The three other people Ford has named as attendees have said they have no memory of the party, including a life-long friend of Ford’s who says she has never met Kavanaugh, though she believes Ford’s accusation.
“A man’s life is in tatters,” Trump said Tuesday. “His wife is shattered.”
“They destroy people,” he added, presumably referring to the Democrats who have led the opposition to Kavanaugh. “They want to destroy people. These are really evil people.”
Earlier in the night, the crowd at the rally could be heard chanting, “We want Kavanaugh.”
The president in particular criticized some Democrats’ statements that Kavanaugh does not deserve a presumption of innocence.
“Guilty until proven innocent, that’s very dangerous for our country,” Trump said. “I have it myself all the time, but for me it’s like part of the job description. … Let it happen to me. It shouldn’t happen to him.”
He also went after the credibility of Julie Swetnick’s allegation against Kavanaugh. Swetnick alleged in a sworn affidavit last week that Kavanaugh participated in a scheme to drug or intoxicate women at parties in order to gang rape them.
“They had [the allegation of] gang rape, many times. Well that turned out to be false,” Trump said of Kavanaugh after calling the situation “crazed.”
He specifically mentioned an interview Swetnick did with NBC News’s Kate Snow on Monday, in which her comments raised new questions about her allegation that Kavanaugh drugged girls.
“Did you see that interview?” Trump said of Swetnick. “This woman had no clue what was going on. No clue. Yet she made the most horrible charges against a … great father, great husband.”
Swetnick wrote in her sworn affidavit that she “witnessed efforts by … Kavanaugh … to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room.”
On Monday, Swetnick told Snow, regarding Kavanagh, “I don’t know what he did, but I saw him by [the punch bowls at the parties].”
Snow said that NBC attempted to contact four people Swetnick said could corroborate her contention that gang rapes were prevalent at house parties in the area in the 1980s. According to NBC, two did not respond, one was deceased and one said he had no memory of Swetnick.
“How horrible is this?” Trump said. “People are saying, ‘Well maybe it’s true. And because of the fact that maybe it’s true, he should not become a United States Supreme Court justice.”