Kennedys join Reagan, King relatives in scolding Trump for gun remark

Members of the Kennedy family sternly rebuke Donald Trump for joking about “the possibility of political assassination,” joining the relatives of other slain or wounded US leaders in condemning recent rhetoric by the Republican presidential nominee.

Trump alarmed many in the political world and beyond on Tuesday when he suggested that “Second Amendment people” — those who support gun rights — could act against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton or the justices she would appoint to the US Supreme Court if she were president.

It was beyond the pale for the Kennedys, who wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that Trump’s “dark and offensive rhetoric” should disqualify him from the presidency.

“Political violence is the greatest of all civic sins,” writes William Kennedy Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith, nephew and sister of Democratic president John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, and senator Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 as he campaigned for president.

“Today, almost 50 years later, words still matter,” the Kennedys write.

“So it was with a real sense of sadness and revulsion that we listened to [Trump] as he referred to the options available to ‘Second Amendment people,’ a remark widely, and we believe correctly, interpreted as a thinly veiled reference or ‘joke’ about the possibility of political assassination.”

The Kennedy column follows criticism by the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., who was slain two months before Robert Kennedy, and the daughter of Ronald Reagan, who was wounded by a would-be assassin in 1981, 69 days into his presidency.

— AFP