Election 2016: The candidate with a ‘black soul’

Donald Trump isn’t making it easy to be a Republican in 2016.

Some GOP lawmakers are looking for a way to distance themselves from their anointed standard-bearer, after the Republican presidential nominee, in what certainly seemed like a new low, hurled an attack at the bereaved parents of a Muslim American soldier who died in a car bombing in Iraq while trying to save other troops.

Khizr Khan, father of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, had given an emotional seven-minute speech last week at the Democratic National Convention invoking the memory of his son, who died in 2004. Humayun Khan was 27.

In his speech, Khizr Khan challenged Trump’s comments about Muslims and his call to halt Muslim immigration to the United States. He said Trump has “sacrificed nothing and no one.”

“Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution?” he rhetorically asked Trump as he pulled a copy from his suit jacket pocket. “I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law.’”

Trump, in a statement Saturday, said Khan “has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things.”

The Republican nominee took aim at Khan’s wife, as well. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say,” Trump said in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”

Ghazala Khan told MSNBC in an interview Friday that she didn’t speak because she remains – understandably – distraught by her son’s death. The Khans stood on the convention stage with an enormous picture of their son behind them. She pushed back at Trump for criticizing her silence, saying in an op-ed in The Washington Post on Sunday, that Trump “knows nothing about true sacrifice.”

Later over the weekend, Khizr Khan said Trump has “a black soul” and “is devoid of feeling the pain” of a mother who is grieving the loss of a child.

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From social media

This entire thread, from a Republican strategist, is worth reading:

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This story was originally published August 1, 2016 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Election 2016: The candidate with a ‘black soul’."