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Trump backtracks on Islamic State claim

After days of alleging repeatedly that President Barack Obama literally founded the Islamic State group, Donald Trump abruptly shifted tone on Friday and insisted his widely debunked claim had been sarcastic. When an interviewer pointed out Russian Federation had annexed Crimea, Trump said he meant Russian Federation wouldn’t dare go farther if he were president.

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“We’ve really been given a false narrative”, Mr Trump said of his struggles in Utah.

In the past few days, Trump first roused a storm of opposition by suggesting at a rally that Second Amendment supporters would see to it that if Hillary Clinton were to become president, she would be stopped from repealing the amendment.

Trump argued that the uproar in response to his comments suggests that political pundits just can’t figure him out.

“No, Barack Obama is not the founder of ISIS”, Clinton tweeted.

As a highly respected member of the corrupt, liberal, corporate, dishonest, mainstream media, I have to come clean on this one.

This whole flap started on Wednesday when Trump called Obama the “founder of ISIS”.

“ISIS will hand her the most valuable player award”.

HUGH HEWITT: I’d just use different language to communicate it.

Trump responded: “I don’t care”.

PAGING MOSCOW: Last month Trump caused a stir in a news conference by saying “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails” missing from Clinton. And I give it to him, and I give it to, I gave the co-founder to Hillary.

In a later speech to homebuilders in Miami on Thursday, Trump said his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be given “the most valuable player award” by ISIS.

Hewitt again: “But he’s not sympathetic to them”.

Republicans frequently trace the birth of Islamic State to the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw the last US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. “He hates them. He’s trying to kill them”, Hewitt said, according to a transcript of the show.

The problem is, the human-shaped mound of Doritos dust that is Donald Trump can not distance himself from the raw footage of the statement, nor the follow-up interview highlighted by CNN.

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That created a leadership opening for Obama, at the time an IL senator who, as we all know, was born in Kenya and raised as a Muslim secret agent destined to become president of the United States. Experts credit that to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who built Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s current leader who changed the name to ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in 2013. The GOP’s official talking points are that Obama is a bad president and that his foreign policy decisions in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere have contributed to the rise of ISIS.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is encountering worrying signs as his campaign moves into the November election