Given a chance by radio host Hugh Hewitt to clarify his comments, Trump doubles down on literal interpretation and calls him Isis’s ‘most valuable player’

Donald Trump refused to back down from his false claim that Barack Obama was “the founder of Isis” on Thursday, insisting: “He was the founder ... The way he got out of Iraq was the founding of Isis.”



The Republican presidential candidate was speaking to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who had attempted to reframe his remark, telling him: “I know what you meant – you meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”

But Trump disagreed. “No, I meant that he’s the founder of Isis, I do,” he said. “He was the most valuable player – I gave him the most valuable player award. I give her too, by the way,” he added of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Trump did acknowledge that the root of his argument was that if Obama “had done things properly, you wouldn’t have had Isis”, but he repeated: “Therefore, he was the founder of Isis.”

And he doggedly pursued that line of thought in a later speech to homebuilders in Miami on Thursday, now suggesting it was Clinton who would be given “the most valuable player award” by Islamic State. “Her only competition is Barack Obama,” he said, adding of Clinton: “Oh boy, is Isis hoping for her.”

Trump’s remarks about Isis came while he is still dealing with backlash from his hint that gun rights supporters might attack Clinton, something that seemed to cause genuine shock in a country that has grown used to Trump pushing the boundaries of appropriate political discourse. On Thursday, Patti Davis, the daughter of late Republican former president Ronald Reagan, joined his critics to lambast him for what she called a “glib and horrifying comment”.

“I am the daughter of a man who was shot by someone who got his inspiration from a movie, someone who believed if he killed the president the actress from that movie would notice him,” she said, referring to the attempted assassination of Reagan by John Hinckley in 1981.

Trump’s remark about Clinton, she said, “was heard by the person sitting alone in a room, locked in his own dark fantasies, who sees unbridled violence as a way to make his mark in the world, and is just looking for ideas. Yes, Mr Trump, words matter. But then you know that, which makes this all even more horrifying.”

Trump first claimed Obama was “the founder of Isis” on Wednesday night at a rally in Sunrise, Florida.

“Isis is honoring President Obama,” Trump said of Islamic State. “He is the founder of Isis. He founded Isis. And, I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”

On Thursday, Clinton attacked Trump for the remarks on Twitter. “It can be difficult to muster outrage as frequently as Donald Trump should cause it, but his smear against President Obama requires it,” she wrote. “No, Barack Obama is not the founder of Isis. Anyone willing to sink so low, so often should never be allowed to serve as our commander-in-chief.”

Since July’s Republican convention, Clinton has taken a firm lead in the polls as Trump has struggled from controversy to controversy, pursuing a feud with the Muslim family of a dead US army captain and suggesting Russia publish any of Clinton’s missing emails it has hacked, before this week’s inflammatory remarks. The Democratic candidate is 7.9 points ahead in the latest polling average compiled by Real Clear Politics.

On Thursday, Time magazine claimed that Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus had told Trump that if he did not manage to right his campaign, the party might abandon support for his presidential bid and focus instead on Republicans running for Congress elsewhere in the country.

Quoting two anonymous party officials familiar with the conversation, Time said Priebus had told Trump that internal polling suggested he was on track to lose the election and that he would have been better off heading to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a break than hitting the trail after the convention.

Trump dismissed the story. “Reince Priebus is a terrific guy,” he told Time. “He never said that.”

Clinton was attempting to shift the focus to the economy on Thursday with a speech in Detroit. She intended to try to make the case that Trump’s policies would benefit him and his wealthy friends, and to characterize his plans as an update of “trickle-down economics”.

Her speech was in part a response to one given by Trump in the beleaguered Rust Belt city on Monday, when he proposed dramatically slashing taxes, reducing income tax brackets from seven levels to three – of 12%, 25% and 33% – and eliminating income taxes for individuals who earn less than $25,000 annually, or $50,000 for a married couple.

That speech had been intended to reboot his flagging campaign, but was soon overtaken by the controversy over his “second amendment people” comments, which in turn gave way to Wednesday’s remarks about Obama and Isis.

Republicans have long sought to blame the turmoil in the Middle East on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, often criticizing the president for underestimating the threat Isis poses. But Trump has routinely gone a step further by stating directly that Obama is sympathetic to terrorists. Immediately after the 12 June mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 dead and 53 injured, Trump said cryptically that Obama “doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands”.

In his speech on Wednesday, the former reality TV star pointedly chose several times to repeat the president’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama.

The origins of Isis trace back to the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The group has been deemed an offshoot of al-Qaida, which carried out the attacks on 9/11. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant terrorist viewed as the founder of Isis, was killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad in 2006.

Although Isis has expanded rapidly during Obama’s tenure, seizing in particular on the Syrian civil war, the administration has also made gains in its military campaign against the extremist group. US army Lt Gen Sean MacFarland said on Wednesday an estimated 45,000 fighters linked to Isis had been killed in the two years since the US-led military coalition against the network was launched.

Trump has not articulated a clear strategy against Isis, other than to threaten a ruthless bombing campaign and continuously push his proposal to ban Muslim immigration from the US.