House Speaker Paul Ryan and Dr. Ben Carson both expressed criticism of the Trump campaign’s social media habits in the wake of a tweet which used a 6-pointed star in an attack on Hillary Clinton. Paul Ryan criticized the tweet directly on the Charlie Sykes radio show. The Hill reports:
“Look, anti-Semitic images, they’ve got no place in a presidential campaign,” Ryan said during a radio interview with Charlie Sykes on WTMJ in Milwaukee. “Candidates should know that. The tweet’s been deleted. We’ve got to get back to the issues that matter.”
Ryan made it clear that Trump’s staff, not the candidate himself, was responsible for the tweet but added, “They’ve got to clean this up.” Ryan has criticized Trump and his campaign on a several occasions in the past few months.
Trump surrogate Ben Carson seemed to share Ryan’s concern Tuesday morning:
Social media provides a great platform for discourse, but we must be careful with the messages we send out.
— Ben & Candy Carson (@RealBenCarson) July 5, 2016
A spokesman for Dr. Carson confirmed that this was a reference to Trump’s Twitter habits, though the 6-pointed-star tweet was not mentioned directly.
As Ryan noted, the original tweet has since been deleted and replaced with a revised version which uses a circle instead of a star:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/749261175968436224
Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, now a CNN contributor, said the backlash over the image was “political correctness run amok.” News site Mic discovered the original image was posted on an anti-Semitic message board more than a week before Trump’s campaign used it.
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