LOWELL, Massachusetts — Donald Trump may have been only 13 miles away from where Bill Clinton was campaigning Monday afternoon, but the former president seemed far from the GOP front-runner’s mind when he took the stage Monday night.
While Trump spent the morning on CNN hitting Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky scandal and reminding viewers of the impeachment trial he endured, on the stump he was mum about Bill, and used just a few previously stated attack lines on Hillary Clinton.
“Let’s say Hillary’s president,” he mused at one point. “Uh oh. Four more years of Obama, that’s what you call it!” Minutes later he again assured the crowd that four more years of Obama is “what you’re getting with Hillary.” It almost seemed as though Trump was workshopping the best label with which to tag her — in the same way he successfully branded Jeb as “low energy,” he could use a golden arrow of attack against Clinton.
RELATED: Trump ad fact checked for Mexican border footage, campaign says ‘no sh–‘
Despite mentioning Obama several times — and congratulating one protester for saying what he couldn’t when the man called out “Obama sucks” — Trump didn’t elaborate on his prior promise to overturn the president’s pending executive order on gun control. Whereas on Saturday he was forceful in his stance against gun control and for the Second Amendment, Monday’s rally brought few mentions of the issue and silence about Obama’s plans.
However, the night was punctuated by protesters: More than half a dozen interrupted his nearly hour-long remarks. Attendees were instructed ahead of the event to not harm the protesters, an announcement that is becoming more frequent at the start of Trump’s events.
Audience members followed those rules as far as could be seen, cheering “Trump” and “U-S-A” until the interrupters were escorted out by event security and law enforcement. Something else that was added to Monday’s pre-program: A video that began with footage of Ivanka Trump announcing her father on the day he declared his candidacy, interspersed with a montage of Fox News personalities talking about Trump, and finishing with him promising to make America great. Throughout, photos of Trump and his family appeared over the voices on the video.
Another topic on which Trump was silent at Monday night’s event was his new ad buys, set to hit New Hampshire and Iowa airwaves in coming days. The ads made headlines both as Trump’s first foray into his own political TV ads, as well as for a fact check of footage that purported to show the Mexican border but actually was of the Moroccan border with Spanish enclaves. Trump’s campaign manager colorfully told NBC that “no sh—“ the footage wasn’t of Mexico, adding that the footage use was intentional to show what could happen to our country if we leave our border as is.








