"If you're going to go out and think you can take a shot at someone and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you,” said Perry. | Getty Rick Perry accuses Khan of striking 'first blow' against Trump

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Donald Trump was right to criticize a Gold Star father who delivered a scathing rebuke of the Manhattan billionaire at the Democratic National Convention because “Mr. Khan is the one that went out and struck the first blow.”

With his wife, Ghazala, at his side, Khizr Khan became the unexpected star of the Philadelphia convention’s final night when he spoke about his son, an Army captain killed in Iraq in 2004, and said of Trump, “you have sacrificed nothing and no one.” Khan delivered another forceful applause line when he questioned if Trump had ever read the Constitution, as he pulled a pocket version of the document from inside his jacket.


That first admonition by Khan was enough, Perry said, to make the Pakistani immigrant fair game for criticism from Trump.

“Mr. Khan is the one that went out and struck the first blow,” said Perry, an Air Force veteran. “And in a campaign, if you're going to go out and think you can take a shot at someone and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you.”

“I think the Democrats used him in a way that quite frankly I'm not sure I approve of. We love our veterans, we love our Gold Star families, but the fact of the matter is Mr. Khan politically used his time on that stage to go after Donald Trump,” Perry continued. “Why in the world he thought that he would get a free ride with that is beyond me. He shouldn’t get a free ride when he’s going to inject himself in the political arena.”

Trump allies have revived the controversy over Trump's feud with the Khan family in recent days, even as the campaign works to climb back into the race after a rough post-convention stretch. The reality TV star's New York co-chair Carl Paladino wrote in an email to BuzzFeed that Khan had dishonored his son by addressing the convention and accused him without evidence of harboring terrorist sympathies.

"Allowing himself to be so controlled by Hillary that he would dishonor the memory of his heroic son shows the man's lack of character and backbone," Paladino said of Khan. "I am certain that most Gold Star parents would despise Mr Kahn's [sic] attempt to politicize his son's loss. Hillary should be ashamed and pillaged for encouraging the Kahn's [sic] to so tragically make fools of themselves."

In the days following Khan’s speech, Trump suggested in an interview that Khan’s wife was perhaps not allowed to speak by her husband. Later, as Khan made the rounds on TV news programs, Trump wrote on Twitter that the father had “viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over T.V. doing the same - Nice!"

“Because he had a son that was lost in this war against terror, I mean, that gives him a free ride to say whatever he would like against a candidate that he’s not for? That is not proper, that is not correct,” Perry said. “I understand this. I know the heartache that goes with that. But don't use that and go after a political candidate and think you’re going to get a free ride because of it.“