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PHILADELPHIA — Donald J. Trump’s campaign is dismissing questions about the white …
PHILADELPHIA — Donald J. Trump’s campaign is dismissing questions about the white supremacist David Duke, after the former Ku Klux Klan
leader said on his radio program that the Republican presidential
nominee left open the possibility of supporting his Senate campaign.
Mr.
Duke said on Monday that Mr. Trump did “as much as he could” in a
weekend interview to suggest that he could back Mr. Duke, the white
nationalist, who is seeking a Louisiana Senate seat.
Asked
about Mr. Duke’s remarks, Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump,
emailed, “Again, Mr. Trump has disavowed David Duke and will continue to
do so.”
She
went on: “If you want to continue to waste our time with these
questions, we will happily address them and allocate our resources for
real stories pertaining to Mr. Trump’s candidacy for president of the
United States and his message to the American people elsewhere.”
The radio program remarks were reported by the website BuzzFeed.
Questions about Mr. Duke have dogged Mr. Trump for months, after he was slow to disavow him
in a CNN interview during the South Carolina primary when the former
Klan leader spoke admiringly of his message. He later said, “I disavow,”
and he criticized Mr. Duke’s suggestion that Mr. Trump had conquered
“Jewish supremacists” within the Republican Party.
In
his own campaign announcement in recent days, Mr. Duke said that Mr.
Trump was championing issues that he had raised for decades.
When
Mr. Trump was asked on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” if he would
support a Democrat over Mr. Duke in the general election, he replied: “I
guess depending on who the Democrat is, but the answer would be yes.
Look, the answer is as quick as you can say it — in fact, I want to
answer you before you — because last time with another person in your
position, I did it very quickly and they said he didn’t do it fast
enough. Rebuked.”
On
his radio program on Monday, Mr. Duke said that Mr. Trump was asked,
“‘Would you vote for a Democrat against David Duke’ and Trump says,
‘Well, I guess it depends who the Democrat will be so the answer is
yes.’”
He
added: “You know, like maybe if there’s a good Democrat. But that’s not
the answer they wanted and the headlines there were all over the place.
You know, Trump basically said he could possibly vote, he could vote
for David Duke if he was running against a liberal Democrat. So he did
something. I think he felt like he did as much as he could do.”
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.
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