Gov. Paul LePage plans to attend Donald Trump’s rally in Portland on Thursday, and hopes to give the Republican presidential nominee some advice.
LePage, a Trump supporter, said on the George Hale & Ric Tyler show on WVOM Tuesday morning that he planned to attend the rally, as he did the candidate’s two previous appearances in Maine, in March and June.
“I am hoping to have a chance to talk to him, and I am going to give him a message: Ignore the media,” LePage said.
Asked about Trump’s most recent controversy over his remarks criticizing the mother of a Muslim-American serviceman killed in action, LePage said his “heart goes out to her and her family.”
But LePage immediately pivoted from the controversy over Trump and the Gold Star family to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, accusing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, of refusing to go in to retrieve the bodies of four Americans.
“Sorry, there are two sides to this story,” LePage said.
The Trump rally, first announced on Saturday, originally had been scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday morning but was changed to 2 p.m. The event will be held at Merrill Auditorium.
Trump held a rally in Bangor in June and one in Portland in March.
The Trump campaign website announced the venue late Monday after news of the visit was leaked to the media over the weekend, but no details were provided.
Merrill Auditorium can seat up to 2,000 people, according to the auditorium website. Those wanting to attend the event can request tickets through the campaign’s website, which said the doors will open at 11 a.m. for what is being billed as a town hall-style meeting.
Trump has come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats for his comments toward Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son Humayun, an Army captain, was killed in 2004 by a car bomber in Iraq. Khizr Khan criticized Trump’s previous comments about Muslims in the United States in a speech at the Democratic convention last week, telling Trump to read the U.S. Constitution.
Trump tweeted and said in interviews over the weekend and this week that Khizr Khan had “no right” to criticize him, and suggested that Ghazala Khan was not permitted to speak at the convention because she is a Muslim woman.
He told a local television station in Ohio that Khizr Khan “viciously attacked” him onstage and hinted that Khan may have been upset at Trump’s previous remarks about Islamic terrorists.
“And when you have radical Islamic terrorists probably all over the place, we’re allowing them to come in by the thousands and thousands,” Trump said in the interview. “And I think that’s what bothered Mr. Khan more than anything else.”
In response, a group of decorated combat veterans, members of Congress and family members of slain soldiers spoke out against Trump on Monday, calling his remarks criticizing a Gold Star family out of line.
Veterans in Maine also criticized Trump’s stance.
Trump’s comments prompted Rep. Richard Hanna, R-N.Y., to become the first Republican member of Congress to buck his party and say that he plans to vote for Clinton, telling Syracuse.com on Tuesday that Trump is a “national embarrassment.”
Hanna is not running for re-election this year.
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