Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Paul Ryan said Tuesday that anti-Semite images have “no place in (a) presidential campaign,” and that the Trump’s communications staff has got to clean up its act, in response to a controversial tweet posted by the magnate.
Ryan was reacting Tuesday to a radio interview about the controversy that erupted last Saturday when Donald Trump posted an image on Twitter of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, next to what looked like a Jewish Star of David and a background of money, with the headline “Most corrupt candidate ever.”
“Anti-Semitic images – they’ve got no place in (a) presidential campaign. Candidates should know that. The tweet has been deleted” and now “we got to get back to the issues that matter to the public,” said Ryan, the Republicans’ highest-ranking elected official, who this month will declare Trump his party’s official candidate for the presidential election in November.
Trump used an image shared on the Internet by someone from an extreme right-wing forum, something that provoked the Anti-Defamation League to slam the use of the symbol and ask the multimillionaire to be a little clearer about dissociating himself from racist and anti-Semitic messages.
The Trump campaign’s director of social media, Dan Scaviano, said the six-pointed star was nothing but the silhouette of a “sheriff’s badge” and that the design of the message has been changed.
Ryan said Tuesday that he really thinks Trump “has got to clean this up…My understanding is this is (done) by staff – not by he himself. But more importantly, they’ve got to clean this thing up.”