Donald Trump used his Twitter account to mount political attacks, settle personal scores and stay in the spotlight throughout the US election.
Even after securing victory as expected Monday in the decisive electoral college, the president-elect is continuing to pursue even the smallest slights against him.
The Bedford-Pound Record Review, a weekly newspaper serving towns 75kms north-east of New York City, published a column last week by a writer who crossed paths in a local bookstore with former president Bill Clinton, husband of Trump’s defeated election rival, Hillary Clinton.
The article described how Clinton began answering questions from customers in the store, which is near the couple’s home in Chappaqua.
The article, next to a front-page story about a Christmas party for the town’s senior citizens, said Clinton described receiving a telephone call from Trump, who spoke cordially “like it was 15 years ago,” when the couple was friendly with the real-estate tycoon in New York social circles - before the bitter presidential campaign.
One bookstore patron asked: “Is Trump smart?” “He doesn’t know much,” Clinton replied. “One thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him.”
Clinton also referenced Comey’s extremely unusual decision to announce what was ultimately a fruitless discovery of e-mails potentially related to the FBI investigation into his wife’s private email server just 11 days before the election, saying “James Comey cost her the election.”
On the question of whether he believed emails stolen by Russian-backed hackers and then leaked to websites like WikiLeaks damaged his wife’s candidacy, Clinton was quoted as saying: “You would need to have a single-digit IQ not to recognise what was going on.”
Clinton’s comments in the obscure publication were eventually repeated on Monday by some national media outlets.
Yesterday morning, Trump, who has 17 million Twitter followers, fired back.
“Bill Clinton stated that I called him after the election. Wrong, he called me (with a very nice congratulations),” Trump tweeted.
Trump wrote that Clinton “doesn’t know much,” using the words from the Bedford-Pound article, “especially how to get people, even with an unlimited budget, out to vote in the vital swing states.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign “focused on wrong states,” Trump said.