Trump says Kavanaugh and his family have been ‘hurt so badly’

President Trump defended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and ripped The New York Times in comments on Air Force One on Tuesday, saying Kavanaugh and his family have been “hurt so badly.”

“They’ve hurt that man and his family so badly. He has been just really devastated by the hurt that’s been caused to him, his beautiful daughters, his fantastic wife. They have hurt him so badly. … He has been hurt so badly, and it’s so unfair. He’s a good man. That wasn’t supposed to be in the cards,” Trump said.

{mosads}Trump has spent the past several days defending Kavanaugh and lambasting The New York Times on Twitter, at rallies and in comments to reporters after the paper published and then corrected an essay over the weekend that revealed a new sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh.

Monday evening, in a series of tweets, Trump called for the “resignation of everybody at The New York Times involved in the Kavanaugh SMEAR story.”

He echoed that theme at his rally in New Mexico on Monday night, telling the crowd, “The left tries to threaten, bully, intimate Americans into submission. They use Democrat prosecutors and phony congressional committees whenever they can. They’ll do whatever they can to demean you, to libel you. They try to blacklist, coerce, cancel or destroy anyone who gets in their way. Look at what they’re doing today with Justice Kavanaugh.”

He continued tweeting on the subject Tuesday morning, writing that the Times “is at its lowest point in its long and storied history” and is “a journalistic disaster.”

The report in the Times’s Sunday Review section by reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly quickly garnered backlash after a correction to the essay was posted Sunday night. The corrected stated that the woman involved in the alleged incident of misconduct did not speak to the Times and that her friends said she does not recall that it happened. In an interview Monday night with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, co-author Kelly said that the omission occurred “in the haste of the editing process.”