Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign hit back against criticisms he believes global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN that Trump “believes climate change is naturally occurring.” She also laughed off evidence of Trump calling global warming a hoax on Twitter.
“I just love that, that this whole man, whether he’s giving a, ‘yeah, I guess so,’ answer to Howard Stern about invading Iraq as a private citizen on an entertainment radio show, or through a tweet, we’re supposed to understand all of his policies,” she told CNN Tuesday morning, according to Politico.
Trump faced off against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the first presidential debate Monday night, and Clinton quickly attacked the real estate mogul for suggesting global warming wasn’t real.
“Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese,” Clinton said during the debate. “I think it’s real.”
“I did not. I did not. I do not say that,” Trump responded.
The media was quick to fact-check Trump, turning up a 2012 tweet where he said “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
Trump tweeted in 2013, “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” Not long after, he tweeted global warming was a “con job.”
Trump made similar comments on the campaign trail, but Conway said he actually believes global warming is naturally occurring, not man-made.
“He believes climate change is naturally occurring. We don’t know what Hillary Clinton believes because nobody ever asks her,” Conway added.
Clinton, however, did say she believes global warming is man-made, and touted her plan to make the U.S. a green energy “superpower.”
“Oh, she gave us the canned, scripted responses, Alisyn, about ‘somebody’s going to be the clean energy superpower,’” Conway said.
“Look, I can’t blame her,” Conway said. “She obviously was over-prepared and wanted to make sure we heard every single scripted moment, including the snarky ones that she had prepared to say.”
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