Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Friday panned GOP rival Carly Fiorina, calling the businesswoman a “robot” after her debate performance.
“She’s got a line of pitter-patter that I’ve heard many times from her,” Trump told Fox News Radio’s “Kilmeade & Friends.”
{mosads}Trump pointed to Fiorina’s stump speech, in which she regularly refers to calling her friend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her first day in the Oval Office.
“I’ve heard that so many times, and she said it the other night too, the same exact words,” Trump said on the program. “Bah, bah, bah — like a robot.”
“In fact, somebody accused her the other day of being robotic. I think she’s very robotic,” he added.
Fiorina, the only woman on the prime-time stage with 10 other presidential candidates at the second GOP debate Wednesday night, saw her profile rise after emerging from the event.
During one segment, Fiorina was asked about a recent insult from Trump about her “face” — which Trump later said was meant to refer to her “persona.”
“I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” Fiorina responded to sustained applause and cheers.
Fiorina, along with retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, has sought to position herself like Trump as a political outsider and is now looking to close the gap with the celebrity business mogul.
Trump reiterated Friday that he “didn’t think Carly was spectacular at all” during the debate, saying the former executive “ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground” and that HP is “still suffering the effects of her reign.”