Trump says he was ‘viciously’ attacked by parents of fallen soldier as criticisms escalate

Angry exchanges between Donald Trump and the parents of an Army captain killed in Iraq continued into Monday with Trump accusing them of “viciously” attacking him and the soldier’s father slamming Trump for not understanding his constitutional rights.

“He wants to have one set of rights for himself and he wants to have another set of rights for others,” Khizr Khan said of Trump on CNN’s “New Day” after Trump claimed Khan had “no right” to attack him last week on stage at the Democratic convention.

In a stirring speech at the DNC, Khan called out the GOP nominee for his divisive proposals regarding Muslims. In response, Trump suggested to ABC on Sunday that he has also made sacrifices for the country and intimated that Khan’s wife, Ghazala, stood silently on stage because her husband wouldn’t allow her to speak, a charge the couple denied.

On Monday, Khan and his wife criticized Trump again.

“Every decent Republican has rebuked his behavior, yet nobody has stood up and said, ‘Enough, stop it. You will not be our candidate,’” Khan said.

A group of families of fallen service members also demanded an apology from Trump on Monday for his “repugnant” and “personally offensive” comments toward the Khans.

“You are not just attacking us, you are cheapening the sacrifice made by those we lost,” the Gold Star families, a group whose relatives died in battle, wrote in a statement. “You are minimizing the risk our service members make for all of us.”

Trump pushed back against the Khans on Twitter, saying he was “viciously attacked” and, minutes later, that “the story is not about” the Khans but about Islamic terrorism.