“No, I meant he’s the founder of Isis. I do.” – 11 August interview with Hugh Hewitt



Trump’s claim that Barack Obama “founded” the terror group Islamic State, with help from Hillary Clinton, condenses and distorts a conservative argument into a hyperbole almost beyond recognition. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt tried to unpack the claim into more sensible form. “You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace,” he said. “They created the Libyan vacuum, they created the vacuum into which Isis came, but they didn’t create Isis.”

“Well, I disagree,” Trump insisted. “I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why Isis came about. If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had Isis. Therefore, he was the founder of Isis.”

Neither Obama nor Clinton could in any rational sense be said to have “founded” Isis: the president has ordered hundreds of soldiers into harm’s way to combat the group, and spent two years and millions of dollars killing its militants in Syria, Iraq and Libya. There is a feasible argument that Obama created a power vacuum by withdrawing US forces from Iraq, but this ignores that his administration failed to come to a troops agreement with Baghdad’s leadership at the time – meaning the withdrawal was not a unilateral decision. Similarly, Obama followed the timeline set by George W Bush to “withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011”.

The argument that regional destabilization created Isis could be extended to Bush-era decisions; his administration purged Ba’athist officials from the government and military, some of whom became Isis’s leadership, and the civil war fought while he was in office saw the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq, segments of which grew into Isis. The militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a former member of al-Qaida in Iraq, is the leader of the group.

Trump supported the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and supported “surgical” intervention to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011, though he now claims otherwise. He also supported withdrawal from Iraq in 2007 and 2008.

Trump also said, without evidence: “In many respects, you know, they honor President Obama.” Isis has repeatedly threatened the president in its propaganda.

This is not the first occasion Trump has insinuated a conspiracy theory that the president harbors sympathies for the terror group. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands,” the businessman said in June.

“What we are talking about is political power. Tremendous political power to save the second amendment. You look, you know, you look at the power in terms of votes and that’s what I was referring to.” – 10 August interview with Fox News

Trump has repeatedly denied that he meant to incite violence against Hillary Clinton by saying: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks – although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.”



But in the context of Trump’s speech it’s not at all clear what he meant by the remark, which could be read as an insinuation of violence, as many Democrats heard it; “like a joke gone bad”, in the words of Trump supporter Paul Ryan, the House speaker; or as something else entirely. The sentence is conditional and is followed by a clear future-tense sentence, suggesting Trump was not talking about the power of a present-day, pre-election voting bloc, but about a possible future. But Trump often ignores the basics of English grammar and speaks in tangled tenses, mountains of interrupting clauses, and without sensible syntax or even subject-verb agreements, all of which can render his speech opaque at best.

In the speech itself Trump leapt from talking about “lower electric bills” and energy policy to the supreme court and gun rights. But Trump spoke of the National Rifle Association obliquely, obscurely saying he would “add the second amendment to the justices”, and quickly moved on to talk of the border and drugs.

The only mention in Trump’s remark of “political power”, as Trump later said he was talking about, came in his vague praise of the “great” NRA for endorsing him, and when he spoke sarcastically about voter ID laws and fraud: “I will not tell you to vote 15 times. I will not tell you to do that, OK?”

Trump said in a separate interview that “there can be no other interpretation” of his remarks than about a “political movement”, but his knotted, rambling style leaves a great deal to interpretation.

“Nobody’s done more for the vets than I have, in terms of support, even in terms of financial support.” – 9 August interview with Time Warner Cable News, North Carolina



Trump’s history of charity is extremely difficult to accurately chart, despite months of investigation by the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and other outlets. He pledged in January to give $1m to veterans, for instance, but did not do so for four months, and seemingly only after the Post reported his unfulfilled promise. The notoriously parsimonious businessman has boasted of millions in donations, but when pressed to provide evidence of these gifts, family and campaign have insisted that the bulk of his donations were made privately.

Dedicated reporting by the Post has found that since 2001, Trump has given at least $3.8m to charity, such as $5,000-$9,999 to the Police Athletic League of New York City. Older records showed $1.9m given to the Donald J Trump Foundation and $101,000 given to veterans. Trump has claimed to have given $102m to charity in the last five years alone, though his campaign says the only cash donations were made privately.

Sock tactics: what yarns did Trump spin this week? Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Other millionaires and billionaires have given far more than Trump. Hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen committed $275m to a mental health facility for veterans, for instance, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, through his foundation, donated $30m to a veterans fund. For a broader range of charities, several billionaires have given away fortunes that far surpass Trump’s claims.

Trump has also denigrated veterans who suffered captivity during their service, saying last year: “I like people who weren’t captured,” and has cast aspersion on the parents of a US army captain who was killed in Iraq.

“Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the US because of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.” – 8 August, Twitter

Shahran Amiri, the nuclear scientist executed in Iran last week, claimed to have been abducted to Arizona by the CIA in a YouTube video uploaded in June 2010. In a video uploaded two days later, he said he had come voluntarily to study. Before long he was reunited with his son in Tehran, and then he disappeared.

At the time, Clinton said: “He’s free to go. He was free to come. Those decisions are his alone to make.”

Intelligence officials later told the New York Times that he was a voluntary defector and that the videos were made under pressure from Iranian and American authorities, respectively. Weeks after his voluntary return to Tehran, on 15 July 2010, he disappeared.

Also on that day, the New York Times reported, citing US officials, that Amiri had given them “significant, original” information “about secret aspects of his country’s nuclear program”. American officials had promised “a new identity and benefits amounting to about $5m” in return, according to the paper.

In a state department email released years later, Clinton aides warned that Amiri, called “our friend”, wanted to leave. “If he has to leave, so be it,” a former state department special envoy wrote in a 5 July 2010 email.

In other words, Amiri’s assistance to the US had been reported publicly for six years before his execution, years before the release of any emails from state department servers. The FBI has said there is no evidence that Clinton’s private email servers were hacked, though director James Comey has said they were susceptible to attack. The Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign were targeted in a hack that has been largely blamed on Russian security services, and that took place years after Amiri’s disappearance in Iran.