Hours after meeting with elected officials and veterans in his first campaign appearance for Hillary Clinton, Khizr Khan made an impassioned plea to fans of Donald Trump on Wednesday, urging them to reconsider voting for the Republican presidential nominee.
“Time after time, then, before then, and up until now, Donald Trump has proven that he doesn’t [have] the capacity, nor the capability, nor the character or the temperament for the highest office of this country that he seeks,” he said on CNN.
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Khan, the Gold Star father whose son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq, cut an ad for Clinton earlier this month in which he asked Trump, through tears, whether his Muslim-American son would have been welcome in the candidate’s vision for America. The ad came out months after Trump tussled with Khan for criticizing him in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
“I’d like to hear his wife say something,” Trump had said, taking a swipe at Ghazala Khan, who stood silently next to her husband during his convention speech.
“Mrs. Khan had spoken since then at many occasions… But that very moment she under such a grief because our son’s picture was in the background and she was totally unable to speak maintaining the dignity of the occasion, she insisted that she not speak otherwise she would fall apart at the stage,” Khan explained on Wednesday. “So we had agreed she would not speak.”
The speech he delivered at the convention was “on behalf of those who were scared when Trump made that statement about banning Muslims [and] throwing out Hispanic Americans from this country,” Khan said, noting that those same issues are the reason he’s become an active surrogate for Clinton.
“We will do this a million times all over again. And I implore Republicans and the surrogates of Donald Trump. The caliber that your candidate has shown, the capacity that your candidate has shown, rethink about this,” he said.
In Virginia, where Khan visited a local mosque and spent time with Clinton campaign volunteers, Trump trails the former secretary of state by 7.2 percentage points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics state-level polling average.
