Donald Trump Fails To Correct Claim That President Obama Is Muslim Foreigner

Donald Trump Image by Getty Images
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump came under fire on Friday from Republican and Democratic rivals and the White House for not correcting a man who called President Barack Obama a Muslim at a Trump campaign event.
Trump, who in the past has expressed doubts about whether Obama was born in the United States, was told by a man at a town hall event on Thursday in Rochester, New Hampshire, that, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.”
“We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American,” the man said.
Trump did not interrupt the man or challenge his contention in any way.
The billionaire developer’s rise to the top of the Republican field in the race for a November 2016 presidential nominee has been impervious to the various controversies that erupt around him almost daily.
Whether this latest episode would prove to be an important turning point for Trump was yet to be seen.
At least one Republican rival, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said Trump had crossed a line, creating a “defining moment” for his candidacy.
“If I were Donald Trump, I would go on national television and say ‘I handled it poorly and if I had to do it all over again, I would challenge his question,’” Graham said on MSNBC. “It’s OK to apologize.”
Trump in 2011 triggered a controversy by demanding that Obama show evidence that he was born in the United States. The Democratic president produced a longer form of his birth certificate that made clear he was born in Hawaii, not Kenya, as some of his critics have contended.
Obama is a Christian who as president has attended church occasionally.
“Is anybody really surprised that this happened at a Donald Trump rally?” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters when asked about the latest Trump controversy.
He said “the people who hold these offensive views are part of Mr. Trump’s base” and that Trump had shown “a willingness to countenance the offensive views of one member of his audience.”
Trump canceled a campaign event scheduled for Friday in South Carolina, saying he had an important business transaction to attend to.
Trump’s reaction contrasted with how 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain dealt with a woman who called Obama an Arab at a McCain campaign event. McCain immediately stopped the woman and called Obama a decent family man with whom he has policy differences.
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both sharply criticized Trump on Friday.
“He knew or he should have known that what that man was asking was not only way out of bounds, it was untrue, and he should have, from the beginning, repudiated that kind of rhetoric, that level of hatefulness of a questioner in an audience that he was appearing before,” Clinton told reporters in Durham, New Hampshire.—Reuters
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.