In a Sunday morning interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, Donald Trump brushed off his role in a terrorist recruitment video.
The Somali terror group al-Shabaab included the clip of the Republican presidential frontrunner calling for a “total and complete shutdown on Muslims in the United States” in a recently released video intended to recruit new members to the al-Qaeda-affiliated group. When host John Dickerson asked him in the interview if it concerns him at all, Trump essentially dismissed it as no big deal. “I have to say what I have to say,” he told Dickerson. “They use other people too, what am I gonna do?”
The video also included footage of Malcolm X and police brutality against African-Americans in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore to portray the U.S. as a fundamentally racist society and claim that’s what’s in store for Muslim-Americans.
“Look, there’s a problem. I bring it up,” Trump said on the show. He claimed that people have called him to say he has “guts” for talking about it, adding later on Twitter that terror groups will continue to invoke him in their recruitment strategies as long as he’s still leading the race.
Al-Shabbab, not ISIS, just made a video on me – they all will as front-runner & if I speak out against them, which I must. Hillary lied!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2016