Mediaite reports that Professor William Clark appeared on CNN that same day to explain why he refused to meet with Donald Trump. He told host Brooke Baldwin that he was “improving slowly day by day,” but didn’t consider meeting with Donald Trump an essential part of the healing process. He also says, “I’m older than most of the other victims and they had a more traumatic experience being chased by a guy with a knife than I did.”
Clark’s other reason for declining an invite to shaking Trump’s hand was how Trump treated the OSU attack in the first place. He says:
I was frankly a little put off by Mr. Trump’s initial reaction to the attack where he got on Twitter and quickly blamed immigration policies for allowing this to happen. I’ve been a professor for 35 years and I know these issues when students do these things they’re often more complex than that.
Baldwin asks if, as the president-elect, Trump should be given the benefit of the doubt that his intentions in coming to Ohio were good, and if so, what would Clark hope to hear from him. Clark responds, “I’d like him to embrace the message that a vital component of all our universities is their multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-everything character. And I’d like to hear him open up and embrace that rather than start singling out specific minority group and essentially addressing them and saying we can exclude them from this country and our society. I don’t think that’s the way America’s been built and I don’t think that’s the way forward for the country.”
So, if Donald Trump were a completely different person, with good intentions, Professor William Clark might be willing to meet with him.
