Donald Trump accused President Barack Obama on Wednesday of founding the Islamic State group that is wreaking havoc from the Middle East to European cities.
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Trump supporter Newt Gingrich on Friday said that the GOP nominee has failed to understand the importance of being precise.
“ISIS is honoring President Obama”, he said, using an alternate acronym for the terror group.
“And I would say, the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton”, he said. “I do”, Trump said.
“So I said the founder of ISIS, obviously I’m being sarcastic, but not that sarcastic to be honest with you”, he added.
Trump intensified the effort to connect Obama with Islamic State on Thursday morning, as conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt offered the Republican candidate a chance to backtrack.
“I meant exactly that”. He is the founder of ISIS! The terrorist group, in its current form, was officially founded by the group’s current leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
But in a tweet on Friday, he called the comments sarcasm. Despite denial from the campaign, CNN reported on Wednesday that Trump met with the Secret Service after his comments drew aggressive backlash from the Clinton campaign and the media. “But to say that an elected official in our country founded a terrorist organization like ISIS is taking the facts that took place in 2011 and carrying that far too far”. It doesn’t matter to Trump whether his wild-eyed accusations are true; it doesn’t matter to him whether they’re offensive. “He was the most valuable player”, Trump said, adding that Clinton also deserved the MVP award. “At the end, it’s either going to work”, he said in a CNBC interview, “or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very nice long vacation”. “You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace”, Hewitt said. “I do. He was the most valuable player”.
The Clinton campaign response, like many other campaign statements about Trump’s comments and accusations, take the high road – as really, all election discourse should.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump acknowledged on Thursday that his campaign was struggling in Utah, a usually rock-solid Republican state, in a sign that party loyalists were still divided over whether to support him.
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He’s questioned whether the president was really born in the US – a tactic still used by some of his surrogates – and frequently refers to him using his middle name, Hussein, as he did at times during the Florida rally. But after all of Hewitt’s prompting, Trump finally nodded vaguely to Obama’s “bad policies” and how “if he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS”-but even with those caveats, he made it clear his conclusion hadn’t changed: “Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS”.
