The chant was, "Send her back!" The video shows him slowly scanning the crowd, letting it continue. Just for contrast, John McCain, when confronted with a supporter who started to say something nasty about Muslims, immediately shut her down, affirming that they are great family people. He didn't wait for the crowd support for her viewpoint to run its course.
Now, with huge backlash over the chant, Trump professes to be feeling "badly" over what he let happen at the rally. All the news anchors are repeating it verbatim. Time for a little comment from the grammar police.
To do something "badly" means to do that thing incompetently. I would do gymnastics badly. I lose weight badly. I draw badly. However, I feel quite well when it comes to emotions. I might describe the emotion of the moment as happy, sad, proud, angry, puzzled, excited, ashamed, and so on. I am very competent at having feelings. Having emotions such as angry, sad, ashamed could be summed up as "feeling bad". Not badly. Bad.
Feeling "badly" would mean I would be unable to feel emotions. It could be caused by stuffing down those feelings as a result of abuse, where safety is an issue, physically or emotionally. Books are written covering that issue.
It could also be a characteristic of a sociopath, where there is limited or no ability to feel, particularly when it comes to empathy for others. Sociopaths feel badly. Incompetently. Trump has sometimes been described as being a sociopath. He certainly acts like it on occasion. Therefore it is easy to conclude that when he claims he "feels badly", he's perfectly correct.
It's also possible that when the raft of news anchors quote him, they are also perfectly correct.
I wonder how many of them are aware of it.
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