Trump needs to ‘clean up’ his tweets, Ryan says

WASHINGTON – Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan said that a tweet that Donald Trump’s campaign sent out attacking Hillary Clinton, which appeared to have an image of the Star Of David, is another sign that the campaign has to fix its social media messaging.

“I really believe he has got to clean up the way his new media works,” Ryan said in an interview on the Wisconsin radio station WTMJ.

Ryan, R-Wis., told host Charlie Sykes that the tweet is a distraction and blasted the campaign staffer who posted the image of Hillary Clinton with the words “most corrupt politician ever” inside a Star of David.

“Look, anti-Semitic images have got no place in a presidential campaign. Candidates should know that,” Ryan said. “The tweet has been deleted. I don’t know what flunky put this up there, but obviously they got to fix that. We got to get back to the issues that matter to the public.”

The Speaker has criticized Trump in the past for the remarks that the presumptive nominee has made in the past about the judge presiding over the Trump University lawsuit that Ryan called a “textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Ryan said that he will continue to speak out against comments he disagrees with.

“As you know, one of the few times I spoke out against him during the primary, very forcefully, was in this area when he failed to disavow white supremacists,” Ryan said about the time he hit Trump over his refusal to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan.

Trump campaign spokesman Dan Scavino said in a statement that the image in question was selected for being a sheriff’s badge, not the Star of David, and Scavino chose to take down that tweet because he never wants to offend anyone.

Anti-Defamation League Chairman Jonathan Greenblatt said that Trump needs to accept that this tweet was anti-Semitic and not play the blame game.

“It’s long past time for Trump to unequivocally reject the hate-filled extremists orbiting around his campaign and take a stand against anti-Semitism, bigotry, and hate,” Greenblatt said in a statement.