Donald Trump is relentlessly attacking Carly Fiorina after her rise in the polls
Business Insider | By Colin Campbel
Real-estate tycoon Donald Trump has a new campaign-trail foe: former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
On Sunday and Monday, Trump has gone out of his way to trash Fiorina’s candidacy, blasting her business record, her electoral prospects, and even how she sounds when she speaks.
“I think that she’s got a good line of pitter-patter. But when you listen for more than five minutes, you develop a tremendous headache,” Trump said Monday morning on “Fox & Friends.”
Trump had a similar line during a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
“She’s got a good pitter-patter,” Trump observed, according to an ABC transcript, “but if you listen to her for more than five minutes straight, you get a headache.”
But Trump has even more aggressively bashed Fiorina’s tenure at HP and Lucent, another technology company.
“She did a terrible job at Hewlett-Packard. She did a terrible job at Lucent. I mean, those companies are just a disaster and she destroyed Hewlett-Packard,” Trump said on ABC. “I mean, she’s been terrible.”
Trump has also frequently noted that Fiorina’s tumultuous business career was a focal point in her unsuccessful 2010 Senate race in California.
“She was winning until they found out how bad she did in business and, frankly, she got wiped out and lost in a landslide. So I don’t see it as being something that’s going to last because her performance has been terrible,” he said of her candidacy on Fox.
The firestorm of criticism follows last week’s CNN debate in which Fiorina blasted Trump for mocking how her face looks, comments the businessman later insisted were actually about her “persona.” Fiorina suggested the comment was rooted in sexism.
She won accolades for her steely performance and subsequently rose in the polls. A CNN/ORC poll released Sunday found that Trump led the crowded Republican field with 24% of the vote and that Fiorina, who used to have near-zero support, was in second place with 15%.
But in a Sunday tweetstorm, Trump argued that the focus should be on his own dominating position in the polls. He further attacked the media for its pro-Fiorina narrative:
