Donald Trump Twitter interview culls questions from #AskTrump

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump put a call out on Twitter Monday for questions via a hashtag. The result, in addition to the trending #AskTrump — on a day that Threshold Editions announced a forthcoming Trump book would be released Oct. 27 — was a slew of negative questions and several rather vague answers.

Trump began responding around 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time with a series of short videos. He did not react to derisive questions, though he did tackle a couple on the sillier side.

For instance, to @MarketMavensInc’s NFL query, “If Tony Romo is out for the season, what chance do the Cowboys have of a playoff,” Trump said that the quarterback’s injury was “a terrible thing for the Dallas Coyboys,” though he finds the team’s defense to be “excellent.”

And for those unsure of Trump’s connected circle, he included that Romo is “a great guy. I know him.”

Answering “How would you fix the student debt crisis?” (from @EliseChristine), Trump spoke in generalities, saying, “we are going to restructure it . . . so it’s very affordable,” but did not offer specifics.

Seated, in front of a screen bursting with red, white and blue balloons and sporting the Twitter bird logo, he also approached a question about homelessness in the United States (from @mdmrestoration) vaguely, acknowledging it is a “big problem” that largely comes down to a loss of jobs to other countries. “We’re taking our jobs back,” he said, without elaborating.

He did tackle more polarizing issues, including gun control and Israel.

For the former, he stated, “I am very pro Second Amendment,” referring to “just released papers” on the subject at donaldjtrump.com. He then repeated that he’s “very. pro. Second. Amendment.”

As for “How will you protect Israel?” (@dixie hilton), Trump said that the country had been “let down badly by the Obama administration” and that, “I will totally protect Israel.”

Questions now just floating about on Twitter to, we suppose, never be answered, ranged from poking fun to calling attention to Trump’s more controversial opinions. Of these, there were many.

Representative tweets to #AskTrump included:

@ruinedbyreality: “Is it true that if you say Donald Trump 3 times in the bathroom mirror, the hair in the drain will rise up to shout racial slurs?”

@Clarknt67: “My #Corvie is an English Bulldog. Will you deport him too? (He’s brown if that matters.”

@MasMusicMadness: “People never learn from history. Don’t try and invade Russian in the winter. Don’t do a Twitter Q&A if you are a [expletive].”