Donald Trump led the national media on an unusual tour of his new D.C. hotel

WASHINGTON -- It was billed as a campaign event, but all Donald Trump wanted to do was show off his fancy new property.

Trump led a horde of national media on a literal runaround of the hotel he's building in the Old Post Office, just blocks from the White House he hopes to soon call home.

"Let’s take a tour. Nobody asked about the hotel!" he declared as he concluded a half-hour press conference, leading a swarm of close to 200 reporters through the half-finished site.

Even hardened Trump reporters shook their heads at the absurdity of his latest stunt. 

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

The Republican front-runner's campaign had advertised the event as a campaign press conference, but it ended up feeling more like a marketing stunt. Trump stood in front of a Trump Hotels podium, flanked by blown-up artist's renderings of the new hotel's design. During the press conference, he casually defended yet another violent supporter, offered a woman in the audience a job and mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in response to her earlier Twitter rant, referring to her "the Indian" after she had called him "a loser" on Twitter. Trump's comments may have referred to reports that Warren identified herself as Native American when she was a professor at Harvard Law School.

Trump seemed to delight in the antics, saying that hotel tours "is what I'm really good at."

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Trump also went out of his way to defend a man who attacked a protestor at a weekend rally in Tucson, Ariz., saying he "had a very fine record in the Air Force" and had been "treated horribly" by protestors before he decided to lash out.

"This is an African American man who's a supporter who has a great family and he has had enough. And I'll be honest with you, in this country on the larger scale the people of this country have had enough," he declared.

Trump, however, didn't want to talk too much about his meeting with the few Republican lawmakers who were willing to sit down with him during his Monday visit to the nation's capitol. And when pushed on Israel policy, Trump said he'd talk more about his views during an upcoming speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Monday evening.

At one point, Alicia Watkins, a formerly homeless veteran whose story has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, asked Trump about employing veterans at his hotels. Trump in response invited her up to the podium, gave her a hug and offered her a job interview.

"She just seemed like a very good person to me," he said by way of explanation.

Reporters were curious about how Watkins got credentialed as a journalist, especially when so many publications have been barred from Trump events.

Watkins said she had been credentialed through "Troop Media," whose website is currently under construction.

A man who identified himself as Joseph Roberts, who sat with her at the event, said both he and her were "Trump supporters" who were "also media," but that he hadn't heard of Troop Media. 

He said he was with "Stop Abusive and Violent Environments Everywhere," a group that was "concerned about the executive overreach of the current administration," and hadn't been instructed to ask the question by the Trump campaign.

A National Journal photographer who entered the event at the same time as her said she had initially been blocked from the event by Trump staff and had to argue her way to get in, suggesting she wasn't a plant as some reporters had suspected.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.