Donald Trump is calling for a boycott of Apple products until the tech giant relents and helps the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists.

“Boycott Apple until such time as they give that information,” Trump told supporters at a townhall-style event in South Carolina Friday, “Apple ought to give the security for that phone.”

The GOP front-runner pointed out that “the phone’s not even owned by this young thug that killed all these people. The phone’s owned by the government.” Radical Islamist Syed Rizwan Farook worked for San Bernardino County, and the phone is its property. The county consented to the FBI search.

Senior Apple executives said Friday that Congress should be the ones to find a solution to the encryption debate. They also again accused the Justice Department of disregarding civil liberties.

At The Washington Post, Bruce Scheier argues that the software hack the federal government wants from Apple would work on iPhones generally, and that this backdoor Apple is being told to create for the FBI could get leaked into the wider hacking and international intelligence communities, rendering everyone’s iPhones vulnerable.

At a town hall meeting Wednesday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Florida Senator Marco Rubio took a more measured line but also agreed that Apple should work with the FBI to get past the phone’s encryption.

“I think law enforcement has the better argument,” Cruz said. “This concerns the phone of one of the San Bernardino hackers, and for law enforcement to get a judicial search order, that’s consistent with the Fourth Amendment. That’s how the bill of rights operates.”

Carson spoke more vaguely about the need for “public private partnership when it comes to all of these technical things.”

Rubio’s answer was perhaps the most sympathetic to Apple’s position:

If you create a backdoor, there is a very reasonable possibility that a criminal gang could figure out what the backdoor is.  That possibility is — if you create a backdoor, you’re creating a vulnerability. And what you’re not going to chance is the fact that other companies around the world who are not subject to U.S. laws — they could create encryption technology that we’ll never be able to get access to.  

So it’s not as simple as people think it is.  Now Apple is under court order and I’m sure they’re going to appeal it. They need to follow whatever the court order is ultimately.  

But moving forward, we are going to have to work with Silicon Valley. We’re going to have to with the tech Industry to figure out a way forward on encryption that allows us some capability to access information especially in an emergency circumstances where there might be information on there that could prevent a terrorist attack. 

Trump, taking a harsher line, accused Apple CEO Tim Cook of resisting the FBI’s efforts despite a court order “probably to show how liberal he is.”

The Justice Department, which is fighting Apple in court over the matter, believes Cook has another motive for not helping break the phone’s encryption: Business. In a filing Friday requesting a judge to immediately order Apple to give the FBI the necessary technical tools to access the phone’s data, Justice Dept. prosecutors said the FBI’s resistance “appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy.”

“Rather than assist the effort to fully investigate a deadly terrorist attack by obeying this court’s order of February 16, 2016,” prosecutors wrote, “Apple has responded by publicly repudiating that order.”

One final note on Donald Trump’s call for an Apple boycott. The Washington Post observed that at the very time he was calling for the boycott, Trump’s Twitter account was still actively tweeting via an iPhone. Here’s the Post’s screen-grab:

Trump did send out a later tweet, explaining his own plans to avoid Apple products:

I use both iPhone & Samsung. If Apple doesn't give info to authorities on the terrorists I'll only be using Samsung until they give info.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2016