President Barack Obama said at the White House that Trump, a real estate tycoon seeking elected office for the first time, is “unfit” to succeed him as the American leader and that “he keeps on proving it”.
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO and prominent Republican fundraiser Meg Whitman said she will vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in November, calling Donald Trump a “demagogue” who is unfit for the presidency.
Khan was killed in 2004 in Iraq, protecting fellow soldiers from a vehicle bomb.
Obama said that without repudiating Trump, Republican complaints about him “ring hollow”.
“The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president”, he said during a press conference in the White House.
“For me, it is not enough to simply denounce his comments”, said Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) wrote in an op-ed for syracuse.com.
“Wasn’t he disrespectful, though, to the Gold Star family?” “The fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge about critical issues, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, means that he’s woefully unprepared to do this job”. Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said gold star families – the military’s term for a family that lost a loved one in combat – should be “off limits” from criticism.
In response, Trump accused Obama of “failed leadership”.
Also on Tuesday, Representative Richard Hanna of NY became the first Republican in Congress to endorse Clinton, although several other Republicans in Congress have said they will not support Trump.
“We need change now”, Trump concluded.
“There has to come a point at which you say, somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn’t have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world”, Obama said.
Trump said the the Khans had “viciously attacked” him at the Democratic convention and then complained that they continued to assail his candidacy in a series of television interviews in recent days. Khizr Khan said Trump had made no sacrifice for the U.S.as great as his son, Humayon Khan, killed by a suicide bomber while protecting other soldiers. “I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought they couldn’t do the job”, he said.
Many Republican leaders, including Ryan and McCain, have criticized Trump’s attacks on the parents of Army Captain Humayun Khan, who received the Bronze Star Medal after being killed in a auto bomb in Iraq in 2004.
The latest exchanges cast a shadow over the show of unity the party sought to project at the Republican National Convention that formally nominated Trump for president in July. “While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us”. It’s not just the optics of picking a fight with a military family that has GOP officials eager for Trump to move on, but the timing of his attacks: Election Day is just three months away.
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A federal judge who has been a target of Trump’s repeated scorn denied a media request to release videos of the candidate testifying in a lawsuit about the now-defunct Trump University; Trump’s lawyers had argued the videos would have been used to tarnish his campaign.
