‘Women for Trump’ bus rolls into Charlotte with a message
Three days after the release of a video showing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaking about women in vulgar sexual terms, a “Women for Trump” bus rolled into Charlotte, carrying congressional wives and a Gold Star widow who are urging other women to support their candidate.
The bus tour was planned before the video became public Friday and is not sponsored by the Trump campaign, said organizer Nancy Schulze, wife of former Congressman Dick Schulze of Pennsylvania. She said Trump’s comments on the video made in 2005 caught her off guard at first, but did not change her mind about stumping for Trump.
“We’ve all had to process it,” Schulze said. “That was 11 years ago. He wasn’t in political life....Everybody knows what we mean by ‘locker room talk.’ It’s not something that is unusual.”
She added that she knows “the Donald Trump off stage” to be thoughtful and responsible. “If the press wants to stick with this locker room business, we’re moving on.”
Schulze and other speakers said both candidates have flaws, but they’d rather support Trump than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton because of her handling of the 2012 Benghazi attack, her support for abortion, and her goal to appoint liberal Supreme Court justices.
“This election is not about a choice between two personalities,” she said. “It’s about two very different world views. Do they believe in ‘We the people’ or do they believe in ‘We the government’ over the people?”
Schulze added: “The Donald Trump devil we don’t know is much less of a risk to this country than the Hillary Clinton we do know. ”
Also speaking was Dorothy Woods, a U.S. Navy veteran, daughter of Philippine immigrants and Gold Star widow of Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the Benghazi attack. Woods said Clinton “turned her back” on the Americans under her charge at Benghazi and later “told us it was time to move on.”
“It’s not a choice for me,” Woods said. “I am voting for Donald Trump.…I feel like the mainstream media forces voters to get bent out of shape about how Trump says things. But Hillary Clinton is a woman who has repeatedly acted in a way that disqualifies her from being our next commander in chief. Are we basing our decision on how someone sounds, or on actual evidence of how someone acts? He deserves a chance. She had hers.”
In June, after one of the longest, costliest and partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.
In Charlotte, the red, white and blue “Women for Trump” bus was hosted by Carol Jegou, co-owner of All Green Recycling on Atando Avenue. More stops are planned across the state this week. Schulze said: “Suburban women in North Carolina could determine the outcome of this election.”
This story was originally published October 10, 2016 at 9:45 AM with the headline "‘Women for Trump’ bus rolls into Charlotte with a message."