Nearly four months after he first spoke out against Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan is taking on the Republican presidential candidate yet again.
A new commercial released by Hillary Clinton’s campaign Friday opens with Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-American lawyer, holding his son’s military uniform and describing the way his son, Captain Humayun Khan, saved his whole unit when he stopped a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004.
“My son moved forward to stop the bomber,” Khan says in the commercial, as he describes his son’s heroism. “He saved everyone in his unit.”
“He was 27 years old and he was a Muslim American,” Khan says in the commercial.
With tears in his eyes, Khan says, “I want to ask Mr. Trump: Would my son have a place in your America?”.
The question was a clear reference to Trump’s ardently anti-Muslim policy proposals, including his calls for a temporary ban on Muslim travel to the U.S., profiling of American Muslims and increased surveillance of mosques.
But it’s also the latest move in an ongoing feud between the Muslim-American Khan family and Trump, who lashed out after Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. In his speech there, Khan questioned the Republican nominee’s understanding of the U.S. Constitution and accused him of having “sacrificed nothing” for his country.
In response, Trump suggested that Ghazala, who stood silently onstage next to her husband, might have actually been forbidden from speaking at the convention. (Ghazala clarified in a Washington Post op-ed that she’d actually been in too much pain to speak.)
Despite the expressed disapproval of prominent Republicans like Senator John McCain and even one of his closest allies, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Trump has continued to trade barbs with the Khans.
Trump made his latest attack earlier this month, when he suggested during the second presidential debate that, if he were president in 2004, Capt. Humayun Khan would still be alive today because “I would not have had our people in Iraq.”
