Trump reportedly didn’t know what a ’Gold Star family’ was
Donald Trump apparently had no idea what a “Gold Star family” was when he decided to engage in a feud with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, shortly after receiving the Republican presidential nomination this summer.
According to a new report from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, Trump frustrated campaign aides when he lashed out at the Khans, parents of a fallen Muslim American soldier, who criticized Trump on stage at the Democratic National Convention.
“You do know you just attacked a Gold Star family?” an adviser reportedly asked Trump, who simply replied, “What’s that?”
The exchange is among several insightful anecdotes gleaned from interviews with “more than two dozen current and former Trump advisers, friends and senior Republican officials,” all of whom, Sherman writes, described Trump as “an unmanageable candidate who still does not fully understand the power of the movement he has tapped into, who can’t see that it is larger than himself.”
Trump’s clash with the Khans, which has carried on throughout the general election, offers a perfect example of this. Fresh from clinching the Republican nomination in Cleveland, what Trump needed to do, in the words of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was to “focus on the big issues.” Instead, he felt compelled to retaliate against this one personal attack, exasperating advisers like Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman at the time.
“The election is about the American people, it’s not about you,” Manafort reportedly told Trump, who attempted to defend his response to Khan’s speech by pointing to a Breitbart News report alleging that Khizr Khan, a Pakistani immigrant, believes in Sharia law.
“He’s not running for president,” said Manafort, who was eventually replaced by the executive chairman of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon. ”The Clintons did this to us to waste our time getting off message.”
