You can’t say Donald Trump didn’t pivot. It’s just that people expected a shift away from the grade-school bully act that marked the primary season, not a rapid tilt toward full-on madness. Donald Trump, momentarily stuck for what to do after calls to not believe the outcome of the election and suggesting that someone might stop Hillary by shooting her, and apparently out of both babies and Gold Star families to fight, is back with more words of wisdom and peace.
At a rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Trump also said that ISIS "honors" Obama -- who the GOP nominee referred to as "Barack Hussein Obama." …
"In fact, in many respects, you know they honor president Obama. ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He's the founder of ISIS, OK? He's the founder. He founded ISIS."
But President Obama didn’t do this job alone.
He added, “I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”
Don’t worry that ISIS was actually around by several other names while Barack Obama was still a state senator in Illinois. Trump’s deliberate (and repeated) use of the president’s middle name was both a call-out both to birthers, and to the multiple occasions where Trump has hinted—with characteristic subtly—that Obama wants the terrorists to win.
His suggestion that the president was honored by ISIS recalled an earlier controversy when Mr. Trump seemingly implied that the president had some connection to the terrorist massacre of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
“He doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Mr. Trump told Fox News in June. And the use of the president’s middle name recalled Mr. Trump’s questioning of Mr. Obama’s faith during his crusade several years ago to prove that Mr. Obama, who is Christian, was not born in the United States.
So the president was probably in on it from the beginning. Or did ISIS rig the 2008 election? Hmm.
Trump also commented on Seddique Mateen, father of the Pulse nightclub shooter, attending a Clinton rally, in case you thought that Hillary wasn’t also a terrorist sympathizer.
"Of course he likes Hillary Clinton."
Asked on CNBC whether his accusations were appropriate, Trump doubled down.
"[Obama] was the founder of ISIS absolutely, the way he removed our troops. ..I call them co-founders."
Does ISIS honor Obama? Well, it’s hard to know. You can’t ask ISIS in Libya since US-backed forces there captured the last-remaining ISIS HQ on Wednesday.
Pro-government Libyan militias backed by American air power said Wednesday that they had seized the Islamic State’s last stronghold in the country, in the seaside city of Surt.
But maybe ISIS honors the president for how he’s been beating the every loving crap out of them in Syria and Iraq, thought they may be too bust worrying about the impending loss of their last territory.
In public messages and in recent actions in Syria, the group’s leaders are acknowledging the terrorist organization’s declining fortunes on the battlefield while bracing for the possibility that its remaining strongholds could fall.
… signs of desperation are mounting weekly inside the caliphate, which shrank by another 12 percent in the first six months of 2016, according to a report last week by IHS Inc., an analysis and consulting firm.
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ISIS is destroyed in Libya, where it never actually held the oil fields as Donald Trump has claimed. ISIS if falling elsewhere, where it has suffered loss after loss all the time that Trump has been acting as if ISIS was winning.
Followers of ISIS are probably talking about Barack Obama, but what they’re saying … nobody but Donald Trump would take it for an honor.
