Donald Trump has tried to walk back his suggestion that gun rights supporters shoot Hillary Clinton by saying he didn’t mean it, but a former CIA head explained why that excuse doesn’t cut it.
“If someone else had said that outside the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now with the Secret Service questioning him,” Michael Hayden told CNN’s Jake Tapper on The Lead.
Indeed, the Secret Service investigated a Trump staffer after he threatened President Barack Obama on social media. The agency said on Twitter Tuesday that it was “aware” of the GOP presidential nominee’s remarks.
Hayden said it doesn’t really matter if Trump wasn’t intentionally threatening his Democratic presidential rival.
“You’re not just responsible for what you say,” he said. “You are responsible for what people hear.”
And what people heard Trump say was this:
“Hillary wants to abolish ― essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Trump has received a considerable amount of backlash over the remark, but Fox News’ Dana Perino pointed out that if Clinton had made a similar comment, the reaction might have been worse.
“Imagine if she had said, or somebody had said, that about Donald Trump ― like carelessly say, ‘Oh, maybe someone will assassinate him’ ― we would all be going crazy,” Perino said.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar,rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
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