Trump reiterates he literally believes Barack Obama is the 'founder of Isis'
Given
a chance by radio host Hugh Hewitt to clarify his comments, Trump
doubles down on literal interpretation and calls him Isis’s ‘most
valuable player’
Scott Bixby, Sabrina
Siddiqui and Paul Owen
Thursday 11 August
2016 18.29 BST
Donald Trump refused
to back down from his false claim that Barack Obama was “the
founder of Isis” on Thursday, insisting: “He was the founder ...
The way he got out of Iraq was the founding of Isis.”
The Republican
presidential candidate was speaking to conservative radio host Hugh
Hewitt, who had attempted to reframe his remark, telling him: “I
know what you meant – you meant that he created the vacuum, he lost
the peace.”
But Trump disagreed.
“No, I meant that he’s the founder of Isis, I do,” he said. “He
was the most valuable player – I gave him the most valuable player
award. I give her too, by the way,” he added of his Democratic
rival, Hillary Clinton.
Trump did
acknowledge that the root of his argument was that if Obama “had
done things properly, you wouldn’t have had Isis”, but he
repeated: “Therefore, he was the founder of Isis.”
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And he doggedly
pursued that line of thought in a later speech to homebuilders in
Miami on Thursday, now suggesting it was Clinton who would be given
“the most valuable player award” by Islamic State. “Her only
competition is Barack Obama,” he said, adding of Clinton: “Oh
boy, is Isis hoping for her.”
Trump’s remarks
about Isis came while he is still dealing with backlash from his hint
that gun rights supporters might attack Clinton, something that
seemed to cause genuine shock in a country that has grown used to
Trump pushing the boundaries of appropriate political discourse. On
Thursday, Patti Davis, the daughter of late Republican former
president Ronald Reagan, joined his critics to lambast him for what
she called a “glib and horrifying comment”.
“I am the daughter
of a man who was shot by someone who got his inspiration from a
movie, someone who believed if he killed the president the actress
from that movie would notice him,” she said, referring to the
attempted assassination of Reagan by John Hinckley in 1981.
Trump’s remark
about Clinton, she said, “was heard by the person sitting alone in
a room, locked in his own dark fantasies, who sees unbridled violence
as a way to make his mark in the world, and is just looking for
ideas. Yes, Mr Trump, words matter. But then you know that, which
makes this all even more horrifying.”
Trump first claimed
Obama was “the founder of Isis” on Wednesday night at a rally in
Sunrise, Florida.
“Isis is honoring
President Obama,” Trump said of Islamic State. “He is the founder
of Isis. He founded Isis. And, I would say the co-founder would be
crooked Hillary Clinton.”
Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump spoke to a trade group in Floriday
on Thursday, where he reiterated a claim he made during a previous
speech that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ‘the founders’
of Isis. ‘Isis will hand her the most valuable player award. Her
only competition is Barack Obama’
On Thursday, Clinton
attacked Trump for the remarks on Twitter. “It can be difficult to
muster outrage as frequently as Donald Trump should cause it, but his
smear against President Obama requires it,” she wrote. “No,
Barack Obama is not the founder of Isis. Anyone willing to sink so
low, so often should never be allowed to serve as our
commander-in-chief.”
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Since July’s
Republican convention, Clinton has taken a firm lead in the polls as
Trump has struggled from controversy to controversy, pursuing a feud
with the Muslim family of a dead US army captain and suggesting
Russia publish any of Clinton’s missing emails it has hacked,
before this week’s inflammatory remarks. The Democratic candidate
is 7.9 points ahead in the latest polling average compiled by Real
Clear Politics.
On Thursday, Time
magazine claimed that Republican National Committee chair Reince
Priebus had told Trump that if he did not manage to right his
campaign, the party might abandon support for his presidential bid
and focus instead on Republicans running for Congress elsewhere in
the country.
Quoting two
anonymous party officials familiar with the conversation, Time said
Priebus had told Trump that internal polling suggested he was on
track to lose the election and that he would have been better off
heading to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a break than hitting
the trail after the convention.
Trump dismissed the
story. “Reince Priebus is a terrific guy,” he told Time. “He
never said that.”
Clinton was
attempting to shift the focus to the economy on Thursday with a
speech in Detroit. She intended to try to make the case that Trump’s
policies would benefit him and his wealthy friends, and to
characterize his plans as an update of “trickle-down economics”.
Her speech was in
part a response to one given by Trump in the beleaguered Rust Belt
city on Monday, when he proposed dramatically slashing taxes,
reducing income tax brackets from seven levels to three – of 12%,
25% and 33% – and eliminating income taxes for individuals who earn
less than $25,000 annually, or $50,000 for a married couple.
That speech had been
intended to reboot his flagging campaign, but was soon overtaken by
the controversy over his “second amendment people” comments,
which in turn gave way to Wednesday’s remarks about Obama and Isis.
Republicans have
long sought to blame the turmoil in the Middle East on the Obama
administration’s foreign policy, often criticizing the president
for underestimating the threat Isis poses. But Trump has routinely
gone a step further by stating directly that Obama is sympathetic to
terrorists. Immediately after the 12 June mass shooting at an LGBT
nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 dead and 53 injured,
Trump said cryptically that Obama “doesn’t get it or he gets it
better than anybody understands”.
In his speech on
Wednesday, the former reality TV star pointedly chose several times
to repeat the president’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama.
The origins of Isis
trace back to the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The
group has been deemed an offshoot of al-Qaida, which carried out the
attacks on 9/11. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant
terrorist viewed as the founder of Isis, was killed in a US airstrike
in Baghdad in 2006.
Although Isis has
expanded rapidly during Obama’s tenure, seizing in particular on
the Syrian civil war, the administration has also made gains in its
military campaign against the extremist group. US army Lt Gen Sean
MacFarland said on Wednesday an estimated 45,000 fighters linked to
Isis had been killed in the two years since the US-led military
coalition against the network was launched.
Trump has not
articulated a clear strategy against Isis, other than to threaten a
ruthless bombing campaign and continuously push his proposal to ban
Muslim immigration from the US.
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