In a Defiant, Angry Speech, Donald Trump Defends Image Seen as Anti-Semitic
Donald J. Trump on Wednesday offered a defiant defense of his campaign’s decision to publish an image widely viewed as anti-Semitic - saying he regretted deleting it - and vigorously reaffirmed his praise of Saddam Hussein, the murderous Iraqi dictator.
In the span of 30 minutes, an often-shouting Mr. Trump breathed new life into a controversy that was sparked on Saturday by his posting of an image on his Twitter account of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with money seeming to rain down in the background. The image was quickly, and broadly, criticized for invoking stereotypes of Jews. Mr. Trump deleted it two hours later, and replaced the star image with a circle.
“ ‘You shouldn’t have taken it down,’ ” Mr. Trump recalled telling one of his campaign workers. “I said, ‘Too bad, you should have left it up.’ I would have rather defended it.”
“That’s just a star,” Mr. Trump said repeatedly.
It was a striking display of self-sabotage from a presumptive presidential nominee and underscored the limitations of Mr. Trump’s scattershot approach during the Republican primaries - not to mention how difficult he often makes it for his campaign team to control him.
The rally in Cincinnati had been promoted by Mr. Trump’s team for two days as a chance for him to give a tryout to a potential running mate, former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Periodically, beginning midway through Mr. Trump’s speech, the crowd chanted Mr. Gingrich’s name, but Mr. Trump did not heed its wishes.
Mr. Trump had not discussed the Twitter message at length until Wednesday night, at his rally in Cincinnati, and his remarks seemed to clash with those of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, who earlier in the day had defended Mr. Trump in an unusual and candid op-ed article, suggesting that the Twitter post was “careless.”
The attention paid to the controversy had begun to die down by the time Mr. Trump took the stage, and he began to read from notes about the criticism leveled against Mrs. Clinton on Tuesday by the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey.
But within 20 minutes, Mr. Trump tossed his notes aside and moved on to topics closer to home - the criticism he had received for his praise of Saddam Hussein at a rally Tuesday night in Raleigh, N.C.
Mr. Trump reiterated his belief that Hussein was “bad,” but effective at killing terrorists, despite Hussein’s classification by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism.
But the bulk of Mr. Trump’s energy was spent on the Twitter post.
“They’re racially profiling, they’re profiling, not us,” he said of the news media.
Mr. Trump called the news media “dishonest” in the rambling and sometimes manic-sounding address, in which he hopscotched from one topic to another.
He angrily lamented his treatment at the hands of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, which he called a “crooked, crooked, disgusting group.” Raising his voice to a hoarse shout, he complained that the Clinton campaign had released an ad showing Mr. Trump playing golf, though he said he did not play golf on his recent trip to Scotland.
“The picture was from two years before,” Mr. Trump said. “At a different course!”
He also noted, in a calmer tone, that the clip used by the Clinton campaign made him look thin. “The swing,” he added, “actually looked good.”
Hours earlier, the deeply private Mr. Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, wrote the op-ed article in which he described the “Donald Trump I know.”
Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner wrote, is not an anti-Semite.
He also described his family’s experiences during the Holocaust, adding: “I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.”
Mr. Kushner obliquely acknowledged that the Star of David post was a mistake, but cited it as evidence of the refreshing originality of Mr. Trump’s campaign.
“If my father in law’s fast-moving team was careless in choosing an image to retweet, well part of the reason it’s so shocking is that it’s the actual candidate communicating with the American public rather than the armies of handlers who poll-test ordinary candidates’ every move,” he wrote. (OP note: WHAT???)
But Mr. Trump said several times on Wednesday that he saw nothing wrong with the image.
In an interview shortly before the rally, Mr. Trump said, “I didn’t want to delete it - I would have never deleted it. My people deleted it before they told me about it, they did it because of the sensibilities and sensitivities. But when I looked at it, I thought that’s a star. I never thought, that’s the Star of David.”
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Did anyone see this? He came across as more unhinged than normal if such a thing is possible.