Making a U-turn, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump today said his controversial remarks that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were "co-founders" of ISIS was merely a sarcasm and blamed the media for misunderstanding it.
Trump tweeted that the media was missing his sarcasm. "Ratings challenged CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) 'the founder' of ISIS, & MVP.
THEY DON'T GET SARCASM?" he tweeted.
For the past two days, Trump has been receiving nationwide flake after his remarks that Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Clinton, who served as Secretary of State in the first term of the Obama Administration, were founders of the ISIS.
His remarks on Wednesday, which he repeated on Thursday outraged even his own party leaders.
Trump today tried to calm down the situation by saying he was being sarcastic.
"I love watching these poor, pathetic people (pundits) on television working so hard and so seriously to try and figure me out. They can't!" Trump said in another tweet.
"ISIS gained tremendous strength during Hillary Clinton's term as Secretary of State. When will the dishonest media report the facts!" he said.
In an interview to Fox news, Trump alleged that the policies of Obama and Clinton created a vacuum resulting in ISIS gaining ground in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
"We should have never and I have been saying from the beginning we should have never got into Iraq. But once we were in, we should have never left the way we left. We just left it open. And that's when ISIS really came about big league. And now they're in 28 different countries. The President has been trying to play down ISIS like it's not that big of a deal, like they are not as powerful," he said.
"We should knock them out. We should knock the hell out of them. He is not willing to do that. As far as I'm concerned, and I will say it and I will say it to anybody that wants to listen, he is a founder of ISIS. They must love him.
Because without him you wouldn't have the threat, the horrible situation going on around the world with ISIS," Trump told Fox News a day earlier.
"I call him a founder. Look, ISIS could have been knocked out, it could have been knocked out pretty swiftly. The way he got out. We shouldn't have been in Iraq but we shouldn't have gotten out the way we got out. Where he gave a date where he said this is when approximately and even in detail when we're leaving. Look, he has been as a president a disaster bad judgment," he said.
"But really bad judgement as said by Bernie Sanders, bad judgment is Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders said she suffers from bad judgement. She certainly does. You can throw Libya into the puzzle, you can throw plenty of other things into the puzzle. The two of them have been catastrophic for our country. And he is the founder and she is right there with him," Trump said.
