Republicans were again forced into awkward criticisms and defenses of Donald Trump on Wednesday, after the party’s presumptive nominee praised Saddam Hussein for killing terrorists “so good”.

“He was a bad guy. Really bad guy,” Trump told a crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Tuesday night. “But you know what? He did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.”

Trump’s would-be allies in the Republican party were forced to react, yet again, to a statement that defied not only party orthodoxy but basic tenets of American society, including the right to due process. Before the US invasion of 2003, Saddam’s Iraq was listed as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The House speaker, Paul Ryan, who belatedly endorsed Trump, seemed to distance himself from the comments during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday night, though he condemned only Saddam and not the candidate.

“He was one the 20th century’s most evil people. He was up there. He committed mass genocide against his own people using chemical weapons,” Ryan said. “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Ryan made similarly careful criticisms about an image Trump tweeted showing Hillary Clinton, cash and a six-pointed star – a graphic found to originate from a Twitter user who posted white supremacist ideas.

“Look, antisemitic images, they’ve got no place in a presidential campaign,” Ryan told a radio show. “Candidates should know that. The tweet’s been deleted. I don’t know what flunky put this up there. They’ve obviously got to fix that.”

The campaign for Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, denounced Trump for his praise of Saddam. It released a statement from Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser, on Wednesday morning.

Citing Trump’s previous statements on China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, Sullivan said Trump’s “praise for brutal strongmen seemingly knows no bounds”.

“Trump’s cavalier compliments for brutal dictators, and the twisted lessons he seems to have learned from their history, again demonstrate how dangerous he would be as commander-in-chief and how unworthy he is of the office he seeks,” he said.

At least two Republican members of the House defended Trump on Wednesday. “His comment was just a factual comment that Saddam Hussein did not have a terrorist problem,” Chris Collins, a New York representative, told the Washington Post.

In February, Collins became the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, who has struggled to win the backing of established politicians and tried to make a selling point of it. “I think it would be better if [the party] were unified,” he said in May. “And I think there would be something good about it. But I don’t think it actually has to be.”

Darrell Issa, who made a more tepid endorsement of the party’s presumptive nominee, argued that Trump’s statement was more about nonintervention than Hussein personally. The California congressman told the Post that Trump’s position was akin to Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war, and that they were “saying the same thing, effectively: that we shouldn’t have gone in”.

During the rally on Tuesday, Trump also denounced the FBI’s decision not to pursue criminal charges against Clinton before making his remarks on the former president of Iraq.

The Raleigh event was not the first time Trump had praised the dictator. In the past, he said the world would be “100% better” if Saddam or Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi were still in power.

Despite his claims to have opposed intervention in Iraq and Libya, Trump publicly supported military action in both countries. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he told a radio host “I guess so” when asked about whether he supported war, and he told Fox News that George W Bush was “doing a very good job”. In 2011, he said on a video blog that the US should depose Gaddafi: “We should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives.”

Trump has made false claims that he opposed the wars for months. His praise for authoritarian leaders has drawn only occasional rebukes.

After Trump made similar comments in October, Steve Russell, an Oklahoma Republican congressman and retired army lieutenant colonel whose unit aided in the capture of Saddam, spoke out against him.

“He is wrong. Regardless of what people think about the Iraq war, human rights advocates worldwide believe that the one silver lining that came out of the war was the demise of Saddam Hussein,” Russell told CNN.

“Are we kidding? This just demonstrates a complete lack of the facts and a complete lack of understanding of foreign policy.”