AP Photo Trump lashes out at AP photographer who snapped empty chairs

Donald Trump is not happy with the Associated Press photographer who took a picture showing a significant number of empty chairs at a South Carolina event on Wednesday — so unhappy he called him a “f***ing thief,” according to the Daily Mail.

Trump’s remarks about wire photographer Mic Smith follow a rough couple of days for his relationship with the press.


On Wednesday, he said he would no longer appear on Fox News, which responded that Trump "doesn’t seem to grasp that candidates telling journalists what to ask is not how the media works in this country.” Later, he agreed to a meeting with Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to discuss “differences of opinion,” the network said in a statement.

On Thursday, he railed against New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin and POLITICO on Twitter, calling Martin "dishonest" and POLITICO "really dishonest." (Martin, a former POLITICO reporter, mocked pro-Trump "chair truthers" in tweets of his own.)

But it was Smith, apparently, who infuriated Trump the most.

“Tell them they're a fraud, whoever took it. I just got killed on that thing, and it was just really unfair. It's goddamn unfair,” he told The Daily Mail.

Trump was speaking at an event hosted by the Greater Charleston Business Alliance and the South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce in Charleston, S.C.

The chairs were only empty, he explained, because the crowd had surged forward to surround him.

“I was speaking from the podium. Everybody was wrapped around the podium. If they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been an empty seat,” he told the Daily Mail. “'I've never made a speech where there were so many people wrapped around the podium in the front. That's what happened.”

To the billionaire’s credit, a different photo from Smith, who was not available for comment, does show a crowd near the podium. But it doesn't show the back of the room.

AP Photo

Photos from other outlets and reporters' tweets, meanwhile, tell a consistent tale of empty seats. According to Martin's story in the Times, "about a third of the seats were unfilled." MSNBC described the venue as "a half-full room of white people."

Trump's other South Carolina event, a jam-packed town hall hosted by Sen. Tim Scott, "sold out" in just three weeks, a Scott aide told POLITICO.

A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"We are confident that the description of crowd size is accurate," AP spokesman Paul Colford said in an email.