Following Khizr Khan’s highly publicized ridicule of Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention, the Republican nominee has engaged in an ongoing war of words with the Gold Star parents of fallen U.S. Army Captain Humayun S. M. Khan, who died in 2004. Trump has repeatedly disparaged the Khans — especially Ghazala, who was too emotional to speak last Thursday — which prompted calls to back down by members of his own party. Yet Trump doesn’t show any signs of stopping. Nor do his supporters, who made the media rounds on Monday while using conspiracy theories and false arguments to attack the Khan family.
On CNN, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski maintained “if Donald Trump were the president, Captain Khan would still be alive today.” How so? Mostly, per Lewandowski’s insinuation, due to the fact Trump never would have wasted thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars on the Iraq War. (It should be noted that Trump’s oft-repeated claim that he was against the war in Iraq from the beginning have been repeatedly proven false.) Whether or not such a hypothetical scenario is plausible doesn’t matter, but the surrogate’s sidestepping tactic was all too familiar to CNN viewers who witnessed Trump adviser Jason Miller’s attempts to do the same on Sunday.
Yet banter like this paled in comparison to what former Trump adviser Roger Stone did on Twitter. According to The Hill, Stone tweeted links to an article claiming Khizr Khan is actually a member of the Muslim Brotherhood secretly seeking to promote Sharia Law in the United States. “Mr. Khan more than an aggrieved father of a Muslim son,” Stone wrote about the article. “He’s Muslim Brotherhood agent helping Hillary.”
No, seriously. Stone really tweeted this.
Mr. Khan more than an aggrieved father of a Muslim son- he's Muslim Brotherhood agent helping Hillary https://t.co/mJuUYw60nK
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) August 1, 2016
To make matters worse, much of the information “uncovered” by the article has evidently been making the rounds among hardcore Trump supporters. CBS News reporter Sopan Deb found this out firsthand after interviewing a 73-year-old woman at an event in Ohio. She argued Khan “was paid to be on there and that he doesn’t even live in this country.” When Deb corrected the woman, she retorted: “That’s not what the Internet is saying. You know what’s on the Internet is true.”
https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/760169162249539584
Maybe this encounter sounds far-fetched, but Deb insists he “wasn’t being trolled.”
https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/760171206578495488
(Via CNN, The Hill and Sopan Deb on Twitter)