Billionaire Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump raised eyebrows on Thursday when he seemed to sympathize with a man in New Hampshire who said President Obama is a Muslim, Muslims are a problem for America, and that Muslims should be removed from the country.
Trump was in Rochester, N.H., and decided to take questions from the audience. He picked a man who said: “We have a problem in this country: It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one.”
“Right,” answered Trump.
“You know he’s not even an American,” the man continued.
“We need this question, this first question,” Trump interjected with a laugh, opting not to dispute the man’s claim.
“But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?” the man asked.
“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things,” Trump replied, “and you know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that, and plenty of other things.”
Following the event Trump received quite a bit of media scrutiny for his response to the question about Obama being a Muslim, and competing 2016 presidential candidates took the opportunity to bash the business mogul.
Hillary Clinton tweeted out: “Donald Trump not denouncing false statements about POTUS & hateful rhetoric about Muslims is disturbing, & just plain wrong. Cut it out. -H.”
Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski tried to calm tempers by telling CNN that Trump simply did not hear the question properly.
“All he heard was a question about training camps, which he said we have to look into,” Lewandowski explained. “The media want to make this an issue about Obama, but it’s about him waging a war on Christianity.”
President Obama has repeatedly said he is a Christian, although a recent poll shows that 29 percent of Americans still think he is a Muslim.
The exchange at Trump’s rally is similar to one John McCain dealt with in the run-up to the 2008 election, when he was the GOP presidential nominee. Unlike Trump, the Arizona senator chose to defend then-candidate Obama when a woman at a campaign event called him an “Arab.”
“I can’t trust Obama,” said the woman to McCain. “I have read about him and he’s not — he’s a — uh — he’s an Arab. He’s not — ”
McCain interrupted and disagreed, when he said, “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about. He’s not, thank you.”
When it comes to the question of whether Obama was born in the U.S., Trump has challenged Obama to prove his American citizen in the past. In the run-up to the 2012 election, Trump challenged the president to release his birth certificate. When the president did, showing he was born in Hawaii, Trump took credit himself for it.
“I’m very honored to have gotten him to release his long-form birth certificate, or whatever it may be,” he said in a video. In the same video, he continued to criticize Obama’s transparency, then offered to donate $5 million to the charities of Obama’s choice, if the president unveiled his college and passport records.
