Donald Trump’s campaign chairman said Wednesday that the Republican presidential nominee has already apologized in his own way for his attacks on the Khan family.
“Mr. Trump has paid his respect. It’s just nobody’s acknowledged it,” Paul Manafort told George Stephanopoulos on ABC Thursday when asked if Trump will apologize to the parents of a slain Muslim-American soldier.
Stephanopoulos said Trump has not actually apologized.
“Well, what he has said is that he respects and is totally sympathetic to the sacrifices that family has made,” Manafort explained. “Beyond that, I think it’s politics.”
Trump has clashed with Khizr and Ghazala Khan following their speech to the Democratic National Convention last week in which they called out the GOP nominee’s rhetoric and questioned if he had read the U.S. Constitution. Their son, Army Capt. Humayun Kahn of Bristow, Va., was killed in Iraq in 2004.
Manafort explained that the Khan family is part of the bigger picture that Trump is campaigning on: the Islamic State and “the mismanagement of foreign policy.”
“That is what he’s campaigning on. He’s not campaigning on the Khan family,” Manafort said.
Stephanopoulos pressed again as to why Trump has not outright apologized, asking Manafort if he will “move on without an apology.”
“He’s expressed his sympathy, he’s expressed his support for what the family’s going through,” Manafort said. “It’s like the same thing we’re caught up in — what’s the difference between I support you, I endorse you. We quibble over words, but the sentiments are there.”
Trump may not say “the words that everybody wants,” when it comes to the clash with the Khan family, but “he has said he’s sorry for what they’ve gone through.”
