Trumps

MIAMI — Voting technology firm Smartmatic is seeking to dismiss a criminal indictment for money laundering, blaming President Trump and his allies for seeking its prosecution as part of a “campaign of retribution” against those they blame for his 2020 election loss.

Smartmatic’s parent company, UK-based SGO Corporation, was added to a criminal indictment last fall previously charging several executives with paying $1 million in bribes to election officials in the Philippines.

In a motion to dismiss the indictment filed Tuesday, attorneys for Smartmatic said the company had been cooperating with the Justice Department since it first learned of its investigation in 2021, including by producing millions of pages of documents and making presentations to federal agents. A trial date for the executives, including co-founder Roger Pinate, had been set and the company believed that it was in the clear.

But when Trump returned to the White House, the Justice Department reversed course and decided to press charges against Smartmatic. Attorneys for the company said the decision was prompted by Trump’s demands to prosecute his perceived enemies and his “mantra” that Smartmatic helped rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election won by Joe Biden — allegations that are at the heart of a $2.7-billion lawsuit filed by Smartmatic against the president’s allies in the media.

“The prosecution of SGO furthers their collective false narrative that President Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election,” Smartmatic said in the filing in Miami federal court.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Attorneys likened the prosecution to the Justice Department’s targeting of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a Salvadoran migrant who was criminally charged for conduct years earlier after he successfully sued the Trump administration over its decision to deport him.

In the years since the election, the filing states, “Smartmatic USA has exercised its right to hold those individuals and entities legally accountable for their deluge of defamatory statements and the attendant damage inflicts on its business, putting it squarely in the crosshairs for retribution.”

The criminal case against Smartmatic and its employees stems from payments, between 2015 and 2018, that were allegedly made to obtain a contract with the Philippine government to help run that country’s 2016 presidential election. Pinate, who no longer works for Smartmatic but remains a shareholder, has pleaded not guilty.

As part of the criminal case, prosecutors in August sought the court’s permission to introduce evidence they argue shows that revenue from a $300-million contract with Los Angeles County to help modernize its voting systems was diverted to a “ slush fund” controlled by Pinate through the use of overseas shell companies, fake invoices and other means.

They also accused Pinate of secretly bribing Venezuela’s longtime election chief by giving her a luxury home with a pool in Caracas. Prosecutors say the home was transferred to the election chief in an attempt to repair relations following Smartmatic’s abrupt exit from Venezuela in 2017 when it accused then-President Nicolas Maduro ’s government of manipulating tallied results in elections for a rubber-stamping constituent assembly.

Smartmatic was founded more than two decades ago by a group of Venezuelans who found early success running elections while the late Hugo Chavez, a devotee of electronic voting, was in power. The company later expanded globally, providing voting machines and other technology to help carry out elections in 25 countries, from Argentina to Zambia.

But Smartmatic has said its business tanked after Fox News gave Trump’s lawyers a platform to paint the company as part of a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.

Fox said it was legitimately reporting on newsworthy events but eventually aired a piece refuting the allegations after Smartmatic’s lawyers complained. Nonetheless, it has aggressively defended itself against the defamation lawsuit in New York — arguing that the company was facing imminent collapse over its own internal misconduct, not due to any negative coverage.

Goodman writes for the Associated Press.

The reported idea of a special operation to seize Iran’s uranium should alarm anyone who still thinks there is a line between pressure and recklessness. Sending foreign forces into Iranian territory to capture nuclear material would be far beyond coercion. It would be war in plain sight. That risk looks even sharper when it is paired with talk of unconditional surrender and a revived maximum pressure campaign. Officials call that flexibility. In practice, it often creates confusion and a dangerous illusion of control.

Strategic Ambiguity Has Limits

Trump has long preferred threat inflation as a negotiating tool, and his administration’s National Security Presidential Memorandum on Iran makes clear that Washington wants to deny Tehran every path to a bomb. But there is a difference between pressure meant to shape diplomacy and rhetoric that drifts toward occupation logic. A raid assumes the United States can enter a sovereign state, take possession of fissile material, and leave without igniting a larger conflict. That is not strategy. It is a gamble.

A Raid Would Not Stay Small

Iran is not an isolated militia camp. It is a large state with layered security organs, missile capacity, regional partners, and a long memory of external intervention. Any attempt to seize uranium by force would expose American troops, bases, shipping lanes, diplomats, and partners to retaliation across several fronts. Even before talk of a raid, Washington and Tehran had been engaged in indirect nuclear talks in Oman. Replacing diplomacy with a ground mission would not create leverage. It would destroy what remains of a controlled bargaining space.

The Nuclear Picture Is Already Murky

The hardest fact in this debate is that the nuclear picture is already uncertain. In its February 2026 safeguards report, the IAEA said it could not verify the current status of facilities hit in June 2025. Reuters later highlighted that same report’s estimate that Iran had 440.9 kilograms enriched up to 60 percent before the strikes, while the Associated Press noted the wider stockpile had reached 9,874.9 kilograms of enriched uranium in total. Reuters also reported a cat-and-mouse hunt for missing material and confirmed that tunnel entrances at Isfahan were hit. Those facts do not make a commando operation look cleaner. They make it look less knowable.

Force Has Already Damaged Oversight

This is the contradiction hawks avoid. Military action may damage buildings, but it can also damage the inspection system needed to track what survives. The IAEA chief said that returning to Iranian sites was the top priority after the attacks because the agency had lost visibility. Reuters warned even before the war that any new Iran deal would have to address serious watchdog blind spots. Rafael Grossi had already reminded the Security Council that nuclear facilities must never be attacked and later stressed that inspectors must be allowed to do their job. Once oversight is broken, claims about perfect control become less credible.

Pressure Without Diplomacy Can Harden Iran

Advocates of seizure argue that urgency changes the rules. Their point is easy to grasp. If material has been moved, hidden, or split across sites, then delay is dangerous. But urgency cuts both ways. The less certainty there is, the more any raid grows in scope. A supposedly limited mission can quickly expand into repeated searches, broader strikes, and pressure for a longer presence. That trajectory sits uneasily with both the basic ban on the use of force in the UN Charter and the logic of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which depends on verification and compliance, not theatrical confiscation. Reuters has also shown that the damage from earlier strikes was difficult to measure and that U.S. officials later said there was no known intelligence that Iran had moved the uranium. That uncertainty is exactly why fantasies of a clean raid should be treated with suspicion.

Containment Is Less Dramatic, but Safer

There is another reason to reject this path. Public overstatement can create policy traps. Trump has already brushed aside internal caution, including when Reuters reported that he said his own intelligence chief was wrong about Iran’s program. Tehran, for its part, has insisted through officials speaking to Reuters that it will not give up enrichment under pressure. That is not a recipe for surrender. It is a recipe for concealment and hardening. Serious policy should focus on intelligence work, restored IAEA access, sustained diplomatic pressure backed by credible penalties, and a clear effort to prevent a regional war that would leave the uranium question even murkier.

The appeal of seizure is obvious. It sounds decisive and final. But nuclear crises rarely yield to cinematic solutions. They are managed through verification, containment, bargaining, and steady pressure, not through fantasies of absolute control. If this idea is truly being weighed in Washington, it should be rejected before rhetoric turns into mission planning. A ground effort to capture uranium inside Iran would not settle the problem. It could widen the war, shatter what diplomacy still exists, and leave the world with the same material, less oversight, and far more bloodshed.

WASHINGTON — President Trump promised that 2026 would be a bumper year for economic growth, but instead it has kicked off with job losses, rising gasoline prices and more uncertainty about America’s future.

In his State of the Union address less than two weeks ago, the Republican president confidently told the country: “The roaring economy is roaring like never before.” The latest batch of data on jobs, pump prices and the stock market suggests that Trump’s roar has started to sound far more like a whimper.

There is a gap between the boom that Trump has predicted and the volatile results he has produced — one that could set the tone in this year’s midterm elections as he tries to defend his party’s majorities in the House and Senate. With Trump’s tariffs uncertainty ongoing, the war in Iran has suddenly created inflationary concerns regarding oil and natural gas.

The White House says it is still early in the year and stronger growth is coming.

No signs of a jobs boom

“WOW! The Golden Age of America is upon us!!!” Trump posted on social media Feb. 11 after the monthly jobs report showed gains of 130,000 jobs in January.

Since then, the job market has evaporated in worrisome ways.

Friday’s employment report showed job losses of 92,000 in February. The January and December figures were revised downward, with December swinging to a loss of 17,000 jobs. Monthly data can be rocky, but a trend has emerged that shows an enduring weakness. Without the healthcare sector, the economy would have shed roughly 202,000 jobs since Trump became president in January 2025. His administration notes construction job gains outside of the housing sector, which it says point to future hiring growth.

Trump often claims that jobs are going to people born in the United States, rather than to immigrants. But the latest report punctured some of that argument.

The unemployment rate for people born in the U.S. has climbed over the last 12 months to 4.7% from 4.4%. This means a greater share of the people who Trump said would get jobs because of his immigration crackdown are, in fact, searching for work.

Prices at the pump are going up

“Slashing energy costs is among the most important actions we can take to bring down prices for American consumers,” Trump said in a February speech in Texas just before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. “Because when you cut the cost of energy, you really cut — you just cut the cost of everything.”

The president has repeatedly told Americans that keeping gas costs low would be key to defeating inflation. He has talked up the decline, citing figures that were far below the national average to persuade the public that driving was getting cheaper.

But the strikes against Iran that began Feb. 28 have, for the moment, crushed that narrative. Prices at the pump have jumped 19% over the last month to a national average of $3.45, according to AAA. The investment bank Goldman Sachs warned in an analyst note that, if higher oil prices persist, inflation could rise from its 2.4% reading in January to 3% by the end of the year.

The administration is banking on plans to contain any energy price increases, essentially betting that either the conflict will end shortly or the administration can succeed in getting more tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump advisors on Sunday sought to assure anxious Americans that surging fuel prices are a short-term problem.

“We never know exactly the timeframe of this,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNN’s “State of the Union. “But in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing.”

Stocks are off their highs

“You know, we set the all-time record in history with the Dow going to 50,000,” Trump said Thursday at the White House.

This frequently repeated talking point has grown stale. The Dow Jones industrial average, one of Trump’s preferred measures of success, has dropped 5% over the last month. Stocks are up during his presidency, just as they were when Democrat Joe Biden was president. The recent decline could be reversed if the war with Iran ends and companies see solid profits over the next year and beyond. The recent dip, however, should be a warning sign as the administration has stressed the importance of more people investing in the stock market through vehicles such as “Trump accounts” for children.

The stock market has become a barometer of how people feel about the economy, with stock investors tending to have more confidence and those without money in the markets being more pessimistic.

Joanna Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers, noted that in February a “sizable” increase in sentiment among people owning stocks “was fully offset by a decline among consumers without stock holdings.”

Productivity is up, but workers aren’t benefiting

Trump can point to a win in that the economy has become more productive — generating more value for each hour of work. That is a positive sign for long-term growth in the U.S. and a reflection of its strong tech sector.

Business sector labor productivity climbed 2.8% in the fourth quarter of last year, the Labor Department reported Thursday. But the challenge is that the gains might not be spread to workers in the form of higher pay as labor’s share of income last year fell to the lowest level on record, noted Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project, a nonprofit aligned with liberal economic issues.

Economy grew at a faster pace under Biden

“Under the Biden administration, America was plagued by the nightmare of stagflation, meaning low growth and high inflation — a recipe for misery, failure and decline,” Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

The scoreboard tells a far different story, one that makes Biden’s track record in 2024 look better than Trump’s performance last year. The U.S. economy grew at a 2.8% pace during Biden’s last year, compared with 2.2% under Trump in 2025.

As for inflation, the primary measure used by the Federal Reserve is the personal consumption expenditures price index. It was 2.6% in both 2024 and 2025.

Trump has staked his economic argument on doing better than Biden. But while he has avoided the inflation spikes that haunted Biden’s presidency — amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — Trump has not delivered stronger growth or more hiring.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department last week outlined a concise set of military objectives in President Trump’s war against Iran, claiming its ultimate goal is to dismantle Tehran’s ability to project power beyond its borders. Yet it may be targets the Pentagon has largely left unacknowledged that offer the clearest insight yet into Trump’s true intentions.

U.S. military strikes have focused on Iran’s ballistic missile, drone and nuclear programs, as well as its naval assets, according to U.S. Central Command. But strikes have also increasingly targeted Iran’s internal security forces, used by the Islamic Republic to suppress public dissent, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project shared with The Times.

The strikes have targeted at least 123 headquarters, barracks and local bases operated by Iran’s paramilitary organizations, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij militia. Regional police forces, primarily in the capital region around Tehran and in western Iran, near areas dominated by Kurdish groups hostile to the Iranian government, have also been targeted.

Some of those groups are being armed and supported by the U.S. intelligence community, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

Nicholas Carl, with the Critical Threats Project, said the pattern indicates the campaign is already underway to set the conditions for a revolution.

“As we are going after these repressive institutions, we are degrading the ability of the regime to monitor its population, to repress its population,” Carl said. “And so it looks as though the strike campaign may be organized around trying to erode the ability of the regime to repress in those areas.”

Analysts said that strikes against internal forces could be greater than they have measured thus far, noting the difficulty of tracking targets in the war based on publicly available data due to an internet blackout strictly enforced by the Iranian government.

An explosion erupts after strikes near Azadi Tower close to Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran on Saturday.

(Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty Images)

The quieter side of the U.S. campaign suggests a political strategy by the Trump administration that goes beyond simply containing the Iranian government, and may instead aim to lay the groundwork for its overthrow.

Trump and his top aides have been inconsistent in their messaging on their goals for the war, vacillating between calls for regime change and far shorter ambitions, such as an Islamic Republic that remains in power under leadership more acquiescent to the United States.

Before the war began, Trump was presented with an intelligence assessment that large-scale military action was unlikely to topple the Iranian government, two sources familiar with the assessment said. The assessment led analysts at the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon all to advise the White House against proceeding with the operation. The intelligence analysis was first reported by the Washington Post.

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Greasing the wheels for domestic unrest, for insurgency or revolution could serve other strategic purposes for the Trump administration beyond effecting regime change, adding new sources of pressure on an Islamic Republic that, if still intact by war’s end, would face renewed internal pressures at a moment of historic weakness.

Rob Malley, lead negotiator on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and special U.S. envoy for Iran under President Biden, said that a sustained U.S. campaign that cripples Iran’s ability to maintain domestic control could mean “the regime collapses, in the sense that it can no longer, genuinely and effectively, govern the entirety of the country.”

“Right now, what Trump is saying suggests an extremely ambitious, extremely long-term, extremely perilous campaign that will only end with Iran’s surrender, and it’s very hard to see Iran surrendering,” Malley said. But the campaign may already be working. “Their communications have certainly been penetrated — they cannot meet without being targeted by Israel or the United States,” he added.

A woman holds a portrait of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a protest Saturday by medical professionals outside Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, which was damaged in an airstrike earlier this week.

(Majid Saeedi / Getty Images)

“Either the regime stays in place weakened, bloodied, finding it harder to govern a more fragmented, chaotic country,” Malley continued, “or the regime no longer can govern.”

An Israeli official did not deny that internal security forces were being targeted, although the official said that Israel was focused on assassinating Iran’s political and security leadership — “tiers one, two and three,” the official said. The vast majority of the strikes against internal security services thus far have been conducted by the United States.

“Our goal is to weaken the ayatollah regime, to a point where the Iranian people can choose their fate,” the official told The Times. “It’s still not at the point where they can do that, but there is work still to be done.”

By all accounts, the campaign against Iran’s military assets has achieved success. Iranian ballistic missile attacks against Israel and U.S. forces and allies in the region have decreased by 90% after just a week of combat, Defense officials said. Drone strikes have decreased by 83%. Over 30 Iranian vessels, including those used as launching pads for drones and aircraft, have been destroyed — a significant number for Iran’s aged and ill-funded naval fleet.

Trump could simply declare victory based on these results alone, said Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative for Iran in 2020.

“They will get weaker as they use up resources and we bomb more and more relevant sites. Already air traffic is starting up again,” Abrams said, noting that commercial flights in the region began resuming this weekend. “So I doubt that the president will need a protracted campaign.”

But that would leave the regime in place, leaving open the possibility of a revanchist Islamic Republic that could reconstitute its military and crack down further on democratic protesters — an outcome that could create political backlash for Trump, Abrams said, after losing U.S. service members in combat.

A woman jogs amid closed shops in south Tel Aviv on Saturday.

(Olympia de Maismont / AFP / Getty Images)

“The outcome remains entirely in doubt — regime collapse after a wave of protests, civil war, a deal that leaves the regime in place behind a new face,” Abrams added. “A real test for Trump would arise if there is a wave of protests as in January, and the regime again starts shooting. Can he do nothing? Unlikely.”

In his initial speech announcing the start of the campaign, Trump addressed the people of Iran, telling them to shelter in their homes until the U.S. bombing campaign concludes.

“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” the president said. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond.”

But the president’s message grew muddled over the course of the last week, after he offered conflicting goals in a series of interviews with reporters.

He at once said he was expecting to hand-select the next ayatollah, after assassinating Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the opening salvo of the war. In other interviews, he said that the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign had killed many of the potential leaders that Washington could have worked with.

On Friday, Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” He did not specify whether he was referring to a surrender of Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile program, or on control over the country itself, and in a subsequent interview, said it could simply mean “when Iran no longer has the ability to fight.”

Over the last week, Kurdish leaders have shared accounts of Trump and his top aides reaching out to them and encouraging their involvement in the war, including a ground incursion in western Iran from Iraqi Kurdistan. But the president seems to have placed that effort on hold for the time being. “The war is complicated enough without having — getting the Kurds involved,” he told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One.

At Central Command headquarters on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that Trump maintains his promise to the Iranian people at the outset of the war, that a time will come for an uprising.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addresses the audience as President Trump listens during “The Shield of the Americas Summit“ on Saturday, a gathering with heads of state and government officials from 12 countries in the Americas at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Doral, Fla.

(Roberto Schmidt / Getty Images)

“No one’s done more than President Trump to reopen the opportunity for those who want a free Iran to do so,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, it’s common sense, as he said up front, don’t go out and protest while bombs are dropping inside Tehran and elsewhere. There will come a moment where he determines, or they determine, that it’s time to seize that advantage.”

Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Iran, said she expects the government to survive the U.S. assault, “still easily able to outgun and outmaneuver any challenges from the streets.”

But a concerted, prolonged campaign could change that assessment.

“Of course, months of full-scale war certainly could also break the system,” Maloney said, adding: “I don’t think the short-term result would be a stable transition to a more liberal system — but rather a collapse of the state itself, and at least for some period of time, a dangerous vacuum of power and order in the heart of the Middle East.”

Reporting from Washington — The father of an Army captain who died a hero in Iraq looked incredulous.

Donald Trump had seemed to criticize his wife on national television, suggesting that her Muslim faith might be the reason she stayed silent during the couple’s high-profile appearance at the Democratic National Convention last week, when Khizr Khan criticized the GOP presidential nominee.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Khan said his wife was simply too grief-stricken to speak that night. Then the father said something that may sum up Trump’s biggest challenge between now and November: “He had to take that shot at her.”

Trump has built an unlikely presidential campaign on his combative style and language. He can’t seem to resist taking a shot or responding to an attack, even when the political fight seems unwinnable.

That instinct arguably has served Trump well so far, allowing him to win a crowded Republican primary and stay competitive in national polls with Hillary Clinton.

But it has also caused him unneeded political wounds, playing into the Clinton campaign’s argument that he lacks the temperament to lead the country and sometimes stealing attention from Clinton’s own political liabilities.

The public feud with the Khans looks to stir up the biggest self-inflicted controversy since Trump criticized a federal judge in a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. Trump repeatedly questioned the judge’s ability to be fair because his parents were born in Mexico.

The Khan flap may also linger because Trump’s words were directed at grieving parents whose son died while serving the United States, rather than the politicians he usually targets.

“It violates almost every hallmark of traditional politics, but I guess that’s Donald Trump,” said Reed Galen, a veteran Republican consultant who is not supporting Trump or Hillary Clinton. “The way to get to a guy like Trump — and the Hillary campaign is now finally understanding this — this is a guy who can’t let slights, major or minor, go by.”

Trump’s puzzling engagement with the Khans not only inspired an unusually pointed rebuke from Clinton on Sunday, it also sparked broad condemnation from many Republicans.

For much of the weekend, Trump found himself squaring off against the Khans, whose convention appearance was an emotional high point for many Democrats. During the last night of the convention, Khizr Khan, his wife, Ghazala, beside him, recounted the loss of their son, Humayun. Then he questioned Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., pulling out a pocket Constitution and asking whether Trump had even read the document.

Trump could have let the moment pass, or simply praised their sacrifice without confronting them, as other politicians have done when met by military families who have rendered the highest sacrifice.

See the most-read stories in National News this hour >>

Instead, Trump, in an ABC interview broadcast Sunday, said Khizr Khan looked like a “nice guy,” but he questioned why Ghazala Khan did not speak during the convention, saying “maybe she wasn’t allowed to.”

He pushed back against Khizr Khan’s assertion that Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country would have kept his son out. “He doesn’t know that,” Trump said. Then the businessman, who avoided the draft during the Vietnam War, said he too had made “sacrifices,” citing his hiring of “thousands and thousands of people.”

After the ABC transcript from the taped interview was released Saturday, Trump’s campaign attempted to correct course. In a statement released late Saturday, Trump called Humayun Khan “a hero to our country” and said “the real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him.”

Yet he still could not resist keeping the fight alive.

“While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan, who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things,” Trump added.

On Sunday, as the controversy festered, Trump complained on Twitter that “I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention.”

“Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!” he said.

The Khans proved formidable and sympathetic foes as they granted multiple rounds of nationally televised interviews. Ghazala Khan wrote an emotional essay Sunday for the Washington Post, recounting her 12 years of grief since her son died, her inability to enter a room where his picture is displayed because of the pain, and the fact that she could not even bring herself to clean out his closet.

“I don’t think he knows the meaning of sacrifice, the meaning of the word,” Ghazala Khan said of Trump on ABC. “Because when I was standing there, all of America felt my pain. Without saying a single word. Everybody felt that pain, but I don’t know how he missed that.”

While trying to remain above the partisan swamp, they looked shaken yet defiant — casting Trump as someone who lacks a moral compass and the capability for empathy. They challenged Republican leaders to denounce Trump.

As the pressure simmered, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement of support for the Khans, saying he agreed “that a travel ban on all members of a religion is simply contrary to American values.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan also called out Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim travel and praised the “many Muslim Americans [who] have served valiantly in our military, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Capt. Khan was one such brave example. His sacrifice — and that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan — should always be honored. Period.”

Other Republicans were even more forceful.

“There’s only one way to talk about Gold Star parents: with honor and respect,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who lost to Trump in the primary and has withheld his endorsement, wrote on Twitter. “Capt. Khan is a hero. Together, we should pray for his family.” (Gold Stars are awarded to the family members of soldiers who die serving in the U.S. armed forces.)

Tim Miller, a former aide to Mitt Romney, wrote on Twitter that Trump’s words were a “grotesque slander of a dead soldier.” He contrasted them with George W. Bush’s response to an antiwar protest in 2005 by Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq.

“I grieve at every death,” an emotional Bush said at the height of the protest. “It breaks my heart to think about a family weeping over the loss of a loved one.”

Bush said he recognized and thought about the “sincere desire” of those who wanted to pull out of Iraq while laying out his case to keep troops there.

Clinton faced a similar question Sunday on Fox News. She was asked about the assertion by two parents who lost their sons in the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, that Clinton had come to them on the day their bodies were returned to the United States and claimed their deaths were the result of an inflammatory video, rather than terrorism.

“My heart goes out to both of them,” she said, bemoaning their loss and praising them as “extraordinary men.”

“As other members of families who lost loved ones have said, that’s not what they heard — I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said,” Clinton added.

Clinton spoke directly about the controversy later Sunday at a church in Ohio.

“Mr. Khan paid the ultimate sacrifice in his family, didn’t he? And what has he heard from Donald Trump?” Clinton said. “Nothing but insults, degrading comments about Muslims, a total misunderstanding of what made our country great — religious freedom, religious liberty.”

Clinton has made Trump’s reactive style central to her critique. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” she said during her convention speech.

Even in defending against that charge, Trump showed his instinct to counterpunch, something many of his supporters admire.

“She’s a very dishonest person. I have one of the great temperaments,” he said on ABC. “I have a winning temperament. She has a bad temperament. She’s weak. We need a strong temperament.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, blamed the controversy on Clinton, a tactic he has used after previous blowups.

“This is the Clinton narrative,” Manafort said on NBC, when asked about Trump’s comments about Khan. “Mr. Trump, of course, feels sorry for what the Khan family has gone through.”

The controversy came just a few days after another headline-grabbing moment, when Trump on Wednesday effectively baited Russia to hack Clinton’s old email account to try to recover more than 30,000 emails she deleted from the private server she used when she was secretary of State.

“He’s going off down these rabbit trails,” said Ron Nehring, a former national spokesman for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and former chairman of the California Republican Party. “Every day that is spent on these manufactured non-issues is another day he is not training fire on Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities.”

Such controversies tend to overshadow issues that might otherwise gain broader attention, experts say, such as Friday’s disappointing economic growth figures.

During Sunday’s interview with ABC, for example, Trump tried to sidestep questions about his failure to release his tax returns and raised concerns about the timing of three upcoming presidential debates, complaining that two dates overlap with NFL games.

Times staff writer Chris Megerian in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

noah.bierman@latimes.com

Twitter: @noahbierman

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UPDATES:

3:15 p.m.: The story was updated with additional reaction.

The story was originally published at 12:15 p.m.