Donald Trump responded to the attack by the father of a Muslim American Army captain who died in Iraq by saying that he has sacrificed by employing "thousands and thousands of people" and suggested that the bereaved father's wife did not speak because she was Muslim.
"Who wrote that?" the Republican presidential nominee asked George Stephanopoulos of "This Week" to be broadcast Sunday on ABC. "Did Hillary's scriptwriters write it?"
At the Democratic National Convention on Thursday in Philadelphia, Khizr Khan slammed Trump's call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.
His son, Humayun Khan, 27, of Bristow, Va., was killed by a car bomb in Iraq in 2004. He was awarded the Purple Heart and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
"Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America," Khizr Khan said at the Wells Fargo Center. "You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one."
In his interview with Stephanopoulos, Trump retorted: "I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.
"I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures," he added. "I've had tremendous success. I think I've done a lot."
Trump also noted how Khan's wife, Ghazala, stood by his side yet said nothing as her husband bashed the nominee.
"If you look at his wife, she was standing there," he said. "She had nothing to say.
"She probably — maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me."
Trump also said that he had raised "millions of dollars" for veterans and helped to build the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Manhattan.
Khizr Khan, a lawyer with an advanced degree from Harvard Law School who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, told the New York Times that he wrote his own speech with no input from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Trump has been put on the defensive by the emotional testimony Khan gave about his son, an American Muslim soldier killed by a car bomb in Iraq in 2004. Khan spoke in prime time on the final night of the conference, minutes before Chelsea Clinton took the stage in Philadelphia to introduce her mother as the Democratic presidential nominee.
The Republican’s campaign has added campaign stops for Monday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio, two cities visited on a three-day bus tour through those swing states by Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia.
The comments to ABC were Trump’s first response to Khan, who said while his son was killed trying to protect the U.S., Trump had "sacrificed nothing."
Mrs Kahn, although silent at the convention, recalled to MSNBC on Friday her reaction when her son told her he’d been deployed to Iraq. "Don’t become [a] hero for me. Just be my son. Come back as a son," she said. "He came back as a hero."
Trump told ABC that Khan "was, you know, very emotional."
In Denver on Friday Trump took on another critic from the Democratic convention, retired four-star General John Allen, the former Marine Corps commandant who has endorsed Clinton. With Clinton as commander in chief, "our armed forces will not become an instrument of torture, and they will not be engaged in murder, or carry out other illegal activities," Allen said in Philadelphia.
"You know who he is? He’s a failed general. He was the general fighting ISIS. I would say he hasn’t done so well," said Trump, using an acronym for the jihadist group Islamic State. Allen led troops in Afghanistan and coordinated the international coalition fighting Islamic State.
During remarks in Johnstown, Pennsylvania on Saturday Clinton defended Allen as "a distinguished Marine, a hero and a patriot." She didn’t address Trump’s comments on the Khans, but a Twitter hashtag #TrumpSacrifices mocked the GOP nominee.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
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