House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that anti-Semitic images “have no place in a presidential campaign,” several days after Donald Trump ignited a controversy with a tweet featuring a six-sided star and a pile of money in an attack on Hillary Clinton.
The Wisconsin Republican was critical of how the real estate mogul and his social media staff use Twitter.
“Look, I really believe he has to clean up the way his (social) media works,” Ryan said on the Charlie Sykes radio program. “They’ve got to clean this thing up.”
The presumptive Republican nominee set off his latest social media firestorm this past weekend when he tweeted the graphic critical of Clinton.
Critics said the graphic evoked anti-Semitic imagery. The Trump campaign refused to answer questions about the tweet even as reports emerged that the image had been posted to an anti-Semitic, white supremacist message board 10 days earlier.
Trump downplayed the controversy in a tweet Monday morning by slamming the “dishonest media.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called the tweet a “misfire” in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, but praised Trump’s campaign for correcting it quickly.
“Everyone’s upset when you have things that happen that cause these kinds of — you have misfires and controversies, of course you don’t want to see that stuff happen,” he said. “But also, it’s something they realized very quickly had occurred, they fixed the problem and they moved on from it.”
“It’s not like they just sat around and did nothing about it. The guy realized it was a mistake. He went on and put out an explanation of how he did it. These are not people running away from a problem,” Priebus said.