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 Trump, who in the past has expressed doubts about whether Obama
was born in the United States, was told by a man at a town hall
event on Thursday in Rochester, New Hampshire, that, "We have a
problem in this country. It's called Muslims."
"We know our current president is one. You know he's not even an
American," the man said.
Trump did not interrupt the man or challenge his contention in any
way.
The billionaire developer's rise to the top of the Republican field
in the race for a November 2016 presidential nominee has been
impervious to the various controversies that erupt around him almost
daily.
Whether this latest episode would prove to be an important turning
point for Trump was yet to be seen.
At least one Republican rival, Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina, said Trump had crossed a line, creating a "defining
moment" for his candidacy.
“If I were Donald Trump, I would go on national television and say
'I handled it poorly and if I had to do it all over again, I would
challenge his question,'" Graham said on MSNBC. "It's OK to
apologize."
Trump in 2011 triggered a controversy by demanding that Obama show
evidence that he was born in the United States. The Democratic
president produced a longer form of his birth certificate that made
clear he was born in Hawaii, not Kenya, as some of his critics have
contended.
Obama is a Christian who as president has attended church
occasionally.
"Is anybody really surprised that this happened at a Donald Trump
rally?" White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters when asked
about the latest Trump controversy.
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He said "the people who hold these offensive views are part of Mr.
Trump's base" and that Trump had shown "a willingness to countenance
the offensive views of one member of his audience."
Trump canceled a campaign event scheduled for Friday in South
Carolina, saying he had an important business transaction to attend
to.
Trump's reaction contrasted with how 2008 Republican presidential
nominee John McCain dealt with a woman who called Obama an Arab at a
McCain campaign event. McCain immediately stopped the woman and
called Obama a decent family man with whom he has policy
differences.
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders both sharply criticized Trump on Friday.
"He knew or he should have known that what that man was asking was
not only way out of bounds, it was untrue, and he should have, from
the beginning, repudiated that kind of rhetoric, that level of
hatefulness of a questioner in an audience that he was appearing
before," Clinton told reporters in Durham, New Hampshire.
For more on the 2016 presidential race, see the Reuters blog, “Tales
from the Trail” (http://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/).
(Additional reporting by Alina Selyukh in Washington and Amanda
Becker in New Hampshire; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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reserved.]
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