COLUMBIA, S.C. — Donald Trump is a uniter, not a divider, he said on Wednesday.

He had just trashed Marco Rubio, whose stock has been rising following Jeb Bush’s less-than-stellar performance in last week’s debate and Scott Walker’s Monday withdrawal from the race.


The official purpose of Wednesday night’s event, a town hall hosted by Sen. Tim Scott, was to give South Carolinians the chance to question the candidate. But Trump used the occasion to talk up his appeal to non-whites. He can unify a divided country, he said, because “I have a temperament where I bring people together.”

Asked by Scott, the first black Republican elected to the Senate from the South in more than a century, to address criticisms of his racially charged rhetoric, Trump responded, “My relationship with African-American people and businesses has been fantastic.” Trump waved a piece of paper in his hand and cited a recent poll from Survey USA whose questionable results show him getting 25 percent of the black vote against Hillary Clinton in a general election.

The claim prompted Scott to jump out of his seat, grab the paper from Trump and put on an exaggerated show of scrutinizing it before giving a nod of satisfaction.

Trump also said he had a “great relationship with Hispanics,” despite his inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants, because they’re sympathetic to his immigration message. “They don’t want people flooding the country,” he said.

“It was fantastic today,” Trump said referring to an event earlier on Wednesday with the South Carolina African-American Chamber of Commerce in Charleston, where some seats remained empty. The 2,000-seat venue in Columbia was full and took about three weeks to sell out, according to a Scott aide.

Earlier in the day, Trump announced that he was temporarily putting Fox News in the penalty box, tweeting “.@FoxNews has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won't be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future.” By Wednesday evening, however, he said of a return to the network, “I’m sure at some point it will happen.”

But in Columbia, it was Trump’s broadsides against Rubio that turned heads.

He twice knocked the Florida senator’s spotty attendance record and called him a “lightweight” — a dig he’s also aimed at Rand Paul and Bobby Jindal — in pushing back against Rubio’s criticism that Trump has not delved into foreign policy specifics. (“You don’t want the enemy to hear what you’re doing,” Trump explained.)

Trump has been ramping up his attacks on Rubio in recent days. On Tuesday he tweeted, “Senator Marco ‘amnesty’ Rubio, who has worst voting record in Senate, just hit me on national security-but I said don't go into Iraq. VISION.”

At the event earlier Wednesday in Charleston, he said of Rubio, “He's overly ambitious, too young — and I have better hair than he does, right?”

He also said, “I’ve never seen a young guy sweat that much. He’s drinking water, water, water. I never saw anything like this with him with the water.”

At a press availability before the town hall, Trump was more measured in his criticism of Carly Fiorina, who also traveled to South Carolina on Wednesday, calling her a “nice woman” while also disparaging her record as a corporate executive. Fiorina has surged in polls in recent days after clashing with Trump on the debate stage at the Reagan Library, but few see her as a serious contender for the nomination, unlike Rubio.

“I do think she has had a terrible history with Hewlett Packard and Lucent, and I think that’s going to be very hard to overcome,” he said.

But mostly, Trump roamed from topic to topic, mashing up his answers to Scott's questions with his usual stump speech and whatever seemed to be on his mind.

He went on the record about labor policy, saying, “Got to have right to work” and crediting business-friendly laws for South Carolina’s attractiveness to large employers like Boeing, which operates a plant in North Charleston.

He also weighed in on cyber security, saying, “The Internet does cause problems because people are finding things out about us that they never knew before … The government is going after the St. Louis Cardinals for hacking the Houston Astros baseball team. Can you believe this?”

Supporter Chad Hatley, a 46-year-old attorney, said he saw a softer side of Trump at the event. “He comes off better in person than he does on TV. He’s more relatabale. Less brash.”

A new Fox News national poll released Wednesday evening showed Trump still on top – at least for now. The poll found him with 26 percent support, up a percentage point since Aug. 6, with retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson gaining on him with 18 percent and Fiorina also edging up with 9 percent.

Before the town hall, Trump entertained the possibility that — like Rick Perry in 2012 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008 — he would fall out of first place. “Maybe something happens,” he said. “I don’t think it will.”