Trump responded: “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. You get the MVP award – ISIS will hand her the Most Valuable Player award”. “All I do is tell the truth, I’m a truth teller”.
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Trump added later: “No, it’s no mistake”.
“Everyone’s liking it. I think they’re liking it”.
Republicans said Obama was slow to recognize the threat when he said in 2014 that the Islamic State was a “JV” – junior varsity – team even though they gained ground in Syria and Iraq.
Trump has been using the line since at least January and as recently as Wednesday at a campaign rally in Florida.
In 2008, in an interview with the Sioux Falls Argus Leader editorial board, when discussing leaving the primary presidential race between her and then-Sen. “It’s absurd for him to say that Obama and Clinton are founders of ISIS – and he can’t blame the media for this”. He said in January that their policies “created ISIS”. The local group’s then-leader, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in 2006 in a USA airstrike but is still seen as the Islamic State group’s founder. I don’t know. But I tell you what, that will be a awful day if Hillary gets to put her judges in.
On Thursday, Time magazine claimed that Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus had told Trump that if he did not manage to right his listing campaign, the party might abandon support for his presidential bid and focus instead on Republicans running for Congress elsewhere in the country.
While Trump’s remarks landed him in fresh controversy, they did manage to push another deeply divisive row – his remarks that could be interpreted as advocating gun violence against Clinton – out of the headlines.
Officials for both the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said the session is the type of typical meeting that takes place in the middle of a presidential campaign with three months to go until the November 8 election.
Trump also referred to the president by his full name – Barack Hussein Obama – which is often used as a dog whistle by Obama’s fringe critics who believe the president is Muslim or is secretly sympathetic to Islamic terrorists.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended Trump on CNN, saying his remarks were “legitimate political commentary”. This is a tactic, this is not an accident, this is a tactic.
In wake of June’s deadly attack on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, Trump seemed to suggest that Obama conspires with Daesh when he told Fox News Obama “doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands”. He called Clinton the “founder of ISIS” earlier this month. Take a look at San Bernardino. But when Trump pledges to continue to say that the president is a terrorist, you can take him at hisword. “His, the way he got out of Iraq was, that was the founding of ISIS”. That’s what it was. Many see the NY real estate mogul as spending too much time fighting within his own party and have called on him to refocus his campaign message on Clinton.
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Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric is common on the campaign trail and usually a big hit with his supporters. At Wednesday’s rally, the crowd cheered, “Lock her up!” in response to Trump’s attack.
