The series of excuses Donald Trump's campaign has put out for his
exchange about Muslims with a supporter Thursday night just keeps growing. Let's recap. First question at the event. Guy stands up and says, loudly and into a microphone, "We have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims. We know our current president is one." Trump says "Right." Guy says "You know he's not even an American." Trump says "We need this question." Pretty unambiguous so far.
Guy finally gets to an actual question: "But anyway, we have training camps, growing, where they want to kill us. That's my question: when can we get rid of them?" Trump's response is "We're going to be looking at a lot of different things. I mean you know a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there and we're going to be looking at that and plenty of other things."
Then the spinning begins. The first excuse out of the Trump camp was that Trump was talking about protecting the religious liberty of Christians, which was interesting, since nowhere in what the questioner said nor what Trump said was the word "Christian" ever used. The next excuse was that Trump wasn't saying "We're going to be looking at a lot of different things" to get rid of Muslims, but to get rid of Muslim training camps. Excuse number three is excuse number two plus the insistence that Trump didn't hear the part of the question where the supporter referred to the president as a Muslim:
But Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, later told CNN that the candidate did not hear the question about Obama being a Muslim.
"All he heard was a question about training camps, which he said we have to look into," Lewandowski said. "The media want to make this an issue about Obama, but it's about him waging a war on Christianity."
We can have an argument about the antecedent of the "them" in "when can we get rid of them" as the questioner asked it, but considering it came after Trump said "right" and "we need this question" to assertions that the president is a Muslim and not an American, that was not the part of the question and its preface Trump should have been addressing to begin with. If ever there was a moment for "hold up, let's correct the record on a couple things," it was before this question arrived at the subject of Muslims and their alleged training camps. And the fact that Trump's campaign originally tried to change the subject to Christians and their endangered religious freedom says loud and clear that they knew they needed to distract attention from what was really said.