Donald Trump Calls Flint Pastor 'A Nervous Mess'

Donald Trump on Thursday called the pastor who interrupted him during a speech at her church in Flint, Mich., “a nervous mess.”

“Something was up because I noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News. “When she got up to introduce me she was so nervous, she was shaking, and I said, ‘Wow, this is sort of strange.’ And then she came up. So she had that in mind, there’s no question about it.”

Rev. Faith Green Timmons cut Trump off during his speech on Wednesday, when he started to attack Hillary Clinton and her policies.

“Mr. Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint,” Timmons said. “Not to give a political speech.”

Trump backed down. “O.K. That’s good. And I’m going to go back onto Flint,” he said.

But in Thursday’s Fox News interview, Trump accused Timmons of planning to interrupt him.

“She was like a nervous mess, and so I figured something—I figured something was up, really,” he said.

Speaking to reporters after the event on Wednesday, Timmons explained that she had welcomed Trump to the church to learn more about their work in the community, acknowledging that it might have seemed like an “odd situation.”

“They had plans to make it a little more than they originally said, and I said, no, you’re going to stick to the original plan,” Timmons said about the Trump campaign.

“When he asked to come in and make a statement and the statement began to go beyond what he originally said, I asked him to stick to what he said. You came here to welcome our workers and thank them for what they have done, and that’s what he stuck to,” she said, adding that she had wanted Trump to “see the best of Flint” after “degrading” statements he has made about African Americans.

Write to Katie Reilly at Katie.Reilly@time.com.