Making a U-turn, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Friday (Aug 12) said his controversial remarks that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were “co-founders” of ISIS was merely a sarcasm and blamed the media for misunderstanding it.
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His initial comments were seen as accusing Mr Obama of creating conditions that allowed IS to thrive but, asked about that on Thursday, he seemed to go further, telling conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt: “No, I meant that he’s the founder of Isis, I do”.
TRUMP: “He is the founder of ISIS”, he said Wednesday night, using one acronym for Islamic State. “I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton”, Trump said.
Even so, she added, “Trump should have simply said that the Obama administration’s decision to pull all troops out of Iraq, with no stay-behind agreement, created a vacuum and allowed ISIS to metastasize”.
Hewitt responded: “But he’s not sympathetic to them”.
By Friday, Trump tweeted messages about the media’s inability to grasp sarcasm, and how he enjoyed watching them try to figure him out.
President Obama did not, in fact, establish the terrorist organization. National security experts have said the withdrawal of USA troops from Iraq in 2011 made it easier for ISIS-then known in Iraq as Al Qaeda, which experts say first started in 2003, before the US invasion of Iraq, which Trump supported-to gain power in the region. They’re the founders. Reporter: And he lobbed the inflammatory accusation not once – These are the founders of Isis because of bad judgment. He is the founder of ISIS.
Yet on Thursday, Trump was reduced to citing a poll that actually showed him a few points behind Clinton and arguing the race between them was close. “ISIS is honoring President Obama”.
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Appearing in Miami Beach, Florida, on Thursday morning, Trump repeated his attack for the third time, saying the USA government “has unleashed ISIS”. People all around the world tend to take what the president of the United States says very seriously. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS. After all much of the time Democrats have said the same things that Trump did. Republicans believe that the US decision to leave Iraq in 2011 created a power vacuum that allowed al-Qaida in Iraq, a subsidiary of the larger terror group al-Qaida, to morph into the 30,000-strong Islamic State group that in 2014 seized a third of Syria and Iraq. But he and Hillary get the most valuable player award having to do with Iraq. They’d come in. You ever negotiate with the Chinese? “No, it’s no mistake”, he told Hewitt on Thursday about the self-created controversy.
