Donald Trump Calls Pastor Who Interrupted Him in Flint ‘A Nervous Mess’

Scolded Wednesday by a Flint, Michigan, pastor during a visit to the beleaguered city for political attacks on rival Hillary Clinton, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came out swinging Thursday, calling Rev. Faith Green Timmons “a nervous mess” and suggesting she had a political agenda.

Green interrupted Trump’s standard stump speech, in which he touched on a long laundry list of issues he says have been mishandled by Democrats, including the Flint water crisis, former President Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade pact, General Motors’ decision to move jobs to Mexico and perceived failures by the Obama administration.

“Mr. Trump,” Timmons, the pastor of Bethel United Methodist Church said, “I invited you here to thank us for welcoming you to Flint, not give a political speech.”

Trump was genial enough at the time. “Oh, OK,” he said. “That’s good. Then I’m going to go back on to Flint.”

He promised the problems in Flint — a city of just less than 100,000 people that has been under the cloud of a lead-contaminated drinking water crisis for more than two years — “can be corrected and corrected by people who know what they are doing,” but didn’t say exactly how he would do that.

In an interview with Fox News Thursday, Trump said Timmons was shaking when she shut down his blistering attack on Clinton.

“She was so nervous, she was like a nervous mess,” Trump said. “I figured something was up.”

He also chalked it up to game-playing.

“Everyone plays their games, it doesn’t bother me,” he said

Residents started complaining of discolored drinking water with particulate matter shortly after the the city began drawing water from the Flint River in 2014 as a cost-saving move while under the control of an emergency manager.

• See Also: Flint Church Pastor Scolds Donald Trump for Attack on Hillary Clinton

As many as 12,000 children in Flint may have been exposed to lead by drinking the city’s tap water, for whom lead poisoning can be a life sentence of emotional and intellectual problems. Some homes in Flint had water with lead levels more than 850 times the level the EPA considers unsafe.

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons