Trump’s ‘Obama founded ISIS’ comment exemplifies why his campaign is on the brink of doom
Obama no more founded the Islamic State than shopkeepers paying extortion money created the Mafia. Which, of course, would seem to have been Trump's actual point: That it was Obama's foreign policy that created the space for the Islamic State to gain power. Trump has made a similar argument before. At a rally in Mississippi in January, he claimed that "Hillary Clinton created ISIS with Obama," in her position as secretary of state. In June, he said the same thing during a "60 Minutes" interview: Hillary Clinton invented the terror group.
The extent to which Obama deserves blame for allowing the Islamic State to expand in the months after the Syrian civil war began or credit for the United States' (belated) focus on the group is a subject best left to others. But, regardless, Trump later denied that was actually his point, which we'll get to. So let's instead focus on how Trump's rhetoric overlaps so poorly with his campaign effort.
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Part of what motivates Trump to make questionable statements is that he feeds off the approval of his base. He has been repeating the line about Clinton being responsible for the rise of the Islamic State for a while. But the response from blaming Obama was different. His description of the president as the founder of the Islamic State at that rally this week gained volume and frequency as the crowd ate it up. It was almost Pavlovian, watching Trump ride the wave of applause as he said, over and over, that the U.S. president had founded the group.
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Trump embraces arguments common among a subset of the conservative right and that subset applauds his candidacy.
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This may also help explain Trump's bigger flub from earlier this week. On Tuesday, he said at a rally that "Second Amendment people" might be the only way to keep Clinton from appointing justices once she was president. Despite Trump's attempts to reframe the comments as somehow suggesting he was talking about electoral organizing, it was pretty clear that he was picking up on a dark joke that's not uncommon on the right: That at some point government overreach might need to be addressed with the use of the weapons the Second Amendment protects. He was saying something that he probably knew resonated with many people who like him.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/11/donald-trumps-obama-founded-isis-comment-exemplifies-why-his-campaign-is-on-the-brink-of-doom/?postshare=7351470933164752&tid=ss_tw
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