President Barack Obama lit into Donald Trump again on Tuesday, this time attacking the Republican presidential nominee for slandering a Muslim family whose son was killed while fighting in Iraq.
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“I just hear things and I just feel it and I felt it having to do with the primaries”.
The Republican nominee had attacked the soldier’s mother, Ghazala Khan, for remaining silent while on the podium at last week’s Democratic Convention saying she had been silenced by her husband on religious grounds.
Trump has made disparaging comments about a military family who spoke at last week’s Democratic National Convention.
Although the White House press conference with Loong was ostensibly about trade and the president’s attempt to salvage the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the first question Obama fielded from reporters was about Trump’s still-simmering feud with the Khans, and what it says about the celebrity billionaire’s qualification for office. “He would have gone down as doing something really important”, Trump said at a town hall event in Columbus, Ohio. Obama asked. “What does this say about your party that this is your standard-bearer?”. He said that if McCain or 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney had been elected, he knew they would have abided by certain norms, observed “basic decency”, and would have had enough knowledge about economic and foreign policy. In June House Speaker Paul Ryan questioned Trump’s insistence that a federal judge’s Mexican heritage made him unfit to hear lawsuits involving the now-defunct Trump University. Khizr Khan, Humayun’s father, criticized Trump at the Democratic convention, questioning whether Trump had read the Constitution and charging that the NY real-estate developer had sacrificed little.
Trump also said he’d made “a lot of sacrifices”, but then failed to come up with a single example.
“There has to come a point at which you say, ‘Enough.’ The alternative is that the entire Republican Party effectively endorses and validates the positions being articulated by Mr. Trump”.
“This is daily and weekly where they are distancing themselves from statements he’s making”, Obama said.
Mr Trump quickly hit back at the President and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton – whom he often says is running for Mr Obama’s third term – as embracing policies that have destabilised the Middle East, hurt veterans and shipped American jobs overseas.
“He keeps proving it”, said Obama, standing alongside the prime minister of Singapore and casting aside any pretense of domestic unity.
Obama said the fact that the denunciations weren’t met with action makes them “ring hollow”.
McCain was among a host of Republican leaders who distanced themselves from Trump, but stopped short of rescinding their endorsements of the Republican candidate.
Trump won the Republican primary handily, but is trailing Clinton in general election polls by around four percentage points.
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Sen. Mark Kirk, who is facing a tough re-election fight in IL, rescinded his endorsement of Trump in June after the GOP nominee criticized an American-born judge’s Mexican heritage.
