Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States has been a central issue of his campaign — but he has described the ban differently in the weeks since the mass shooting in Orlando.
While gaggling with reporters as he toured his golf club here, Trump suggested in an offhand comment that his ban wouldn’t apply to Muslims from countries not typically associated with terrorism.
“It wouldn’t bother me, it wouldn’t bother me,” Trump said when asked whether he would allow a Scottish Muslim into the U.S. under his policy.
His spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, told CNN Saturday that Trump supports barring only Muslims from “terror states,” not all Muslims.
Trump even indicated that the ban is not ironclad, telling CNN in a brief interview on Saturday he would consider allowing Muslims from states with heavy terrorist activity to enter the U.S., as long as they are “vetted strongly.”
He also told the Daily Mail that individuals from “terror countries” would be “even more severely vetted” but could ultimately be allowed entry into the country.
“People coming from the terror states — and you know who I’m talking about when I talk about the terror states — we are going to be so vigilant you wouldn’t believe it and frankly a lot will be banned,” Trump told CNN after touring his golf course here.
Trump also focused on the need to ban individuals from “terrorist countries” in an interview later Saturday with Bloomberg Politics.
“I want terrorists out. I want people that have bad thoughts out. I would limit specific terrorist countries and we know who those terrorist countries are,” Trump said, again not specifying which countries would be included.
With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, Trump rejected almost every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other Republican primary candidates.
On December 7th, 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump released a statement calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can “figure out what is going on.” The reasons Trump cited for the Muslim ban included studies that did not exist and unsubstantiated claims that there was a “great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population” and the that “it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension.”
It was a statement that, by far, was one of the most bigoted statements Trump, or any other politician, has made in our lifetime.
Donald Trump said Sunday that in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, it’s time for the United States to start looking at racial profiling as a preventative tactic.
The presumptive GOP nominee said in a phone interview with CBS’ Face the Nation:
Well I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country. Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling but we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads.
“It’s not the worst thing to do,” he added.
Trump’s comments come one week after 49 people were shot and killed in a gay nightclub in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Following the massacre, Trump renewed his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S., saying it would have prevented the attack despite the fact that shooter Omar Mateen was born in the U.S.
On Sunday, the GOP politician also said attacks like Orlando would stop if those in the Muslim community would “report” suspicious things.
“When you look at, when you look at people within the Muslim community and where people are living and they don’t report, and a good example of that would be San Bernardino,” he said. “I mean, they had bombs all over their apartment floor and people saw it and nobody reported them, and 14 people were killed, many injured.”
Mateen, Trump added, had definite “red flags” before the attack. “You look at his past, I mean? I’ve never seen a past quite like that,” he said of Mateen. “You look at his record in school, you look at a lot of other things. There were a lot of red flags, this was not a very good young man.”
“We understand there are problems with that because some people are on the terror watch list that shouldn’t be on,” he said. “So I’m working with the NRA, we’re discussing it and again the NRA has the best interests of our country, it just has the absolute best interests of our country.”
Asked about GOP leaders’ criticism of him in recent days, especially over his renewed focus on the Muslim ban, Trump said those Republicans should stop “talking so much” and just “do their job.” The issue is compounded, he added, when the media focuses more on his detractors in the GOP than his supporters.
“I think that honestly they should go about their business and they should do a wonderful job and work on budgets and get the budgets down and get the military the kind of money they need and lots of other things, and they shouldn’t be talking so much,” he said. “They should go out and do their job, let me do my job.”
However according to Trump’s suggestion, we should be racially profiling white Christian males because you are more than 7 times as likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than by Muslim terrorists.
In a speech reacting to the massacre in Orlando where 50 people were killed, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump doubles down on his proposal to ban immigration of Muslims, and he expanded his proposal to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or allies.”
Speaking at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, Trump did not mention foreign policy, discuss the fight against terrorist group ISIS, or propose solutions to combat hate or extremism, instead he said the attack early Sunday morning at the Pulse nightclub was the result of the U.S.’s immigration policies.
Trump said, reading from a teleprompter:
“The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here. That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about.”
The killer was an American born in New York but his father is an immigrant from Afghanistan.
Trump had originally said he would temporarily suspend immigration from Muslims, but he was starting to soften that idea in recent weeks. But after Sunday’s horror, he went further.
“The ban will be lifted when we as a nation are in a position to properly and perfectly screen those people coming into our country. We are importing radical Islamic terrorism into the west through a failed immigration system.”
Trump also attacked presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton throughout his speech, saying she “cannot be a friend of the gay community as long as she” supports current immigration policies. The shooting took place at a nightclub frequented by members of the LGBT community.
He said Clinton wants to “ban guns” and “abolish the Second Amendment.” (Clinton has never said she wants to ban guns or the Second Amendment but she does support banning assault weapons.)
Trump noted that he will “be meeting with the NRA … “to discuss how to ensure Americans have the means to protect themselves in this age of terror.”
Then she wants to “admit the very people who want to slaughter us,” he said.
He also said President Barack Obama has knee-capped the intelligence agencies.
“They’re not being allowed to do their job,” Trump said.
But since he was elected in 2008, the president has supported most surveillance mechanisms used by the intelligence agency implemented under the PATRIOT Act. He pushed for a five year extension that eventually passed Congress in December of 2012.
“As President I will give our intelligence community, law enforcement and military the tools they need to prevent terrorist attacks,” Trump said. “Truly, our President doesn’t know what he is doing. He has failed us, and failed us badly, and under his leadership, this situation will not get any better — it will only get worse.
He also said President Barack Obama has knee-capped the intelligence agencies.
“They’re not being allowed to do their job,” Trump said.
But since he was elected in 2008, the president has supported most surveillance mechanisms used by the intelligence agency implemented under the PATRIOT Act. He pushed for a five year extension that eventually passed Congress in December of 2012.
“As President I will give our intelligence community, law enforcement and military the tools they need to prevent terrorist attacks,” Trump said. “Truly, our President doesn’t know what he is doing. He has failed us, and failed us badly, and under his leadership, this situation will not get any better — it will only get worse
Donald Trump responded to the worst terror attack since 9/11 with a no-holds-barred attack on Muslims and Hillary Clinton that played loose with the facts and was rife with inflammatory rhetoric.
He claimed Clinton wanted to disarm Americans and let Islamic terrorists slaughter them, while seeming to overinflate the number of Syrian refugees and insinuating the perpetrator of the Orlando attack was a foreigner.
In a speech pulsating with tough talk that will likely please his supporters, the presumptive Republican nominee also renewed his call for a ban on Muslim migration into the United States — and extended it to cover all nations with a history of terrorism. Hinting at a huge expansion of presidential power, he vowed to impose such a system by using executive orders.
“The current politically correct response cripples our ability to talk and to think and act clearly,” Trump said framed by two American flags at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. “If we don’t get tough, and if we don’t get smart, and fast, we’re not going to have our country anymore. There will be nothing, absolutely nothing, left.”
Trump’s speech Monday was a clear attempt to use the fallout from Sunday’s attack in Florida that left 49 dead to position himself as a strong agent of change determined to flush out a culture of weakness and incompetence that he said had let terrorism fester and threatened the existence of U.S. culture itself.
It is a strategy that appealed to his base and helped him win the Republican primaries, and he is now deploying it after a rough couple of weeks signifying the start of the general election.
As part of that effort Monday, he delivered some of the most explosive and forceful political rhetoric uttered by a major U.S. political figure in many years, seeming to show little regard for facts.
Trump refused to name Omar Mateen, the killer who went on the rampage in an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, during his speech. But, adding a line not found in his prepared remarks, he said that he was born “an Afghan, of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States.” But the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre was born in New York to parents from Afghanistan.
The real estate magnate also appeared to equate all Muslims who seek to come to the United States with the perpetrators of recent terror attacks — another claim that seems to fly in the face of the evidence about a community that has been present in the U.S. for decades.
“We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer,” Trump said.
“Remember this, radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti- American.”
He also accused Clinton of endangering the country with her plans to bring in more foreigners.
“Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic immigration plan will bring vastly more radical Islamic immigration into this country, threatening not only our society but our entire way of life,” he charged. “When it comes to radical Islamic terrorism, ignorance is not bliss. It’s deadly — totally deadly.”
He accused Clinton of wanting to “allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country. They enslave women and they murder gays. I don’t want them in our country.”
And he repeated an unsubstantiated claim that Clinton wants to deny Americans’ 2nd Amendment rights.
Trump’s rhetoric — which was heavy on toughness but often short on policy details — contrasted sharply with the more nuanced and conventional response to the attack delivered earlier by Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
But he made a case that the current policies were not working and were leaving America dangerously exposed to a tide of Islamic terror he said was coming its way — an argument that many in the GOP find compelling.
He has pointed to the political benefits of the rising fears of terrorism following other recent attacks.
In each instance, Trump sought to project both strength and a lack of concern for the reaction to his provocative rhetoric, calculating that both would help him rise in the polls during the Republican primary. Indeed, a majority of Republican voters agreed with Trump’s call to temporarily ban all foreign Muslims from entering the United States.
“Whenever there’s a tragedy, everything goes up, my numbers go way up because we have no strength in this country,” Trump said on CNN after last December’s San Bernardino shooting. “We have weak, sad politicians.”
Donald Trump’s speech was heavy on inflammatory rhetoric, light on details and facts.
Trump: “The Muslim ban is temporary. We have to find out what is going on?”
There are terrorists running around in Syria and Iraq. They have a book. They think that book is great. The use their book to justify killing others. Why is that so fucking hard to understand? Can he shut up about his stupid ban now?
Plus, aside from being completely and totally xenophobic, there is one major logical flaw with this policy. Meet Omar Mateen, 29 year old who killed at least 50 people in massacre Orlando. An American, born in New York.
Meet James Wesley Howell, 20 year old who was caught with cache of weapons, ammunition and explosive-making materials in his car and apparent plans to attend the L.A. Pride festival in West Hollywood. An American, born in Indiana.
Exactly how would banning foreigners from entering the United States have solved the Orlando massacre or helped to prevent another possible shooting in Los Angeles by Americans?
Trump: A “tremendous flow” of Syrian refugees is pouring into the country free of screening also seemed to be an exaggeration.
Since May 1, 2016, 2,019 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the U.S., according to a State Department official, while only 1,736 were taken in over the first seven months of the fiscal year.
Interestingly, there are a lot of countries in the middle-east that are our friends, like Israel. So is Donald Trump inferring that Israelis are savages? If we remove our friends from the list of Middle-Eastern countries, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, then that leaves only 33,000 immigrants who were admitted into the United States in 2014 from the Middle-East. That would mean Trump is off by 67%.
We’ll have to revise Donald’s truth grade to an ‘F’.
Trump: “[Clinton] wants to take away Americans’ guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us.”
Clinton has called for universal background checks and stricter controls on firearms, but has never called for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment. Another false statement.
Trump: “Remember this, radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti- American.”
You know who has far more effective at being more anti-woman and anti-gay in this country? Republicans.
Donald Trump, who issued a December press release “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” said such a ban “hasn’t been called for yet” and it was “only a suggestion.”
It’s the latest lightning-speed evolution for the real estate tycoon as he pivots from the provocateur who upended the Republican primary to a general election candidate preparing to square off with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“We have a serious problem, and it’s a temporary ban — it hasn’t been called for yet, nobody’s done it, this is just a suggestion until we find out what’s going on,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade Wednesday.
Reality
Donald Trump isn’t toning down his hateful rhetoric at all here. In his very next sentence he is still linking all Muslims with radical Islamic terrorists.
His assertion that his proposed ban was a suggestion is a complete lie. When Trump first introduced the proposed ban back in December he explicitly said in both a speech and in a press release: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Pull up any video of Trump talking about a ban on all Muslims entering the United States and in absolutely zero instances does he say, before this interview, that it was ever a suggestion.
Donald Trump hit back hard Tuesday at Ted Cruz’s father after he made an appeal to “every member of the body of Christ” to vote for his son, and not the “wicked” – calling the comments “disgraceful” and “horrible.”
The Examiner reported that Rafael Cruz had been meeting for days with Indiana pastors, many of whom have since endorsed the Texas senator.
Speaking with the head of the American Family Association of Indiana, the elder Cruz had warned of the “wicked electing the wicked” and urged fellow Christians to come out to vote.
I implore, I exhort every member of the body of Christ to vote according to the word of God, and vote for the candidate that stands on the word of God and on the Constitution of the United States of America. And I am convinced that man is my son, Ted Cruz. The alternative could be the destruction of America.
But Trump unleashed on the Cuban-born Rafael Cruz, a pastor, after he made his religious appeal to Indiana and other voters to support his son in the Republican presidential nominating contest. Indiana is voting Tuesday.
I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to do it. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to say it … You look at so many of the ministers that are backing me, and they’re backing me more so than they’re backing Cruz, and I’m winning the evangelical vote. It’s disgraceful that his father can go out and do that. And just — and so many people are angry about it. And the evangelicals are angry about it, the way he does that. But I think it’s horrible. I think it’s absolutely horrible that a man can go and do that, what he’s saying there.
In a sharp turn, the Republican presidential front-runner then abruptly invoked a tabloid story about Rafael Cruz’s supposed connection to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
Trump has made the statement before that people shouldn’t be “allowed” to say negative things about him and that he would like to limit the freedom for people who disagree with him through litigation.
Also by claiming that Pastor Rafael Cruz shouldn’t preach about supporting a candidate (who happens to be his son) is the definition of a double-standard in the purest sense. Trump has had support from so many pastors who have used their position as a church leader to publicly preach about voting for Donald Trump that a new word was coined, “Trumpvangelicals“. These include Mike Murdock, Paula White, Robert Jeffress, and Joel Osteen, join the list of Kenneth Copeland, and 40 others who met with Trump at Trump Tower in September 2015.
At Trump’s Cleveland rally, Pastor Darrell Scott of New Spirit Revival Center Ministries performed a sermon to introduce Trump to the stage. Pastor Scott called Trump humble, blamed “liberal media for brainwashing” you for thinking Trump could possibly be an out-and-out racist, and directed people to vote for Donald Trump.
Not only would Donald Trump not mind if certain celebrities were to flee the United States if he is elected president, the Republican front-runner said Tuesday that their opposition to his candidacy only increases his will to win.
During a telephone interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump was asked about a tweet from Lena Dunham on Monday in which she vowed to leave the U.S. for Vancouver if he is elected.
Trump’s response: “Well, she’s a B-actor. You know, she has no — you know, no mojo.”
“I heard Whoopi Goldberg too. That would be a great thing for our country,” Trump said, as the show flashed a graphic of celebrities who it said would leave the U.S. for Canada, including Dunham, Jon Stewart and Rosie O’Donnell, with whom the Manhattan real estate mogul has feuded for years.
When co-host Steve Doocy pointed out O’Donnell’s name on the list, Trump remarked, “Now I have to get elected.”
“Now I have to get elected because I’ll be doing a great service to our country,” he said. “Now it’s much more important. In fact, I’ll immediately get off this call and start campaigning right now.”
Donald Trump’s campaign manager appeared to grab a protester by his collar during a rally Saturday in an incident captured on video.
Multiple videos, including CNN’s footage, show campaign manager Corey Lewandowski reaching for the man’s collar as a member of Trump’s security detail also grabs him from behind.
“Corey Lewandowski was speaking with a protester at today’s rally in Tucson, Arizona when the individual he was speaking with was pulled from behind by the man to Lewandowski’s left,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in response to a CNN inquiry, referring to a member of Trump’s private security detail.
“The video clearly shows the protester reacting to the man who pulled him, not to Mr. Lewandowski,” Hicks said, adding that Trump “does not condone violence at his rallies, which are private events paid for by the campaign.”
Lewandowski and the young man appear to exchange words in the moments before the altercation. Hicks said Lewandowski “simply asked the protester to leave.”
“Instead of exiting, the protester grabbed the woman in front of him (in the green shirt), which is when the man to Corey’s left and many others in the scene react to her wincing,” Hicks said.
The protester had been asked to leave once prior to the altercation, according to two sources familiar with the incident. He was able to gain entry back inside before Lewandowski and security removed him for a second time, the sources said.
Trump on Sunday called Lewandowski’s involvement in ejecting protesters “spirited.”
“Security at the arena, the police were a little bit lax. And he had signs — they had signs up in that area that were horrendous, that I cannot say what they said on the sign,” Trump said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I give (Lewandowski) credit for having spirit. He wanted them to take down those horrible profanity-laced signs.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday campaign officials should avoid “getting involved in confrontations.”
“Getting involved is not the answer. I think you leave these things up to the professionals. You’ve got professional police; you’ve got Secret Service,” Priebus told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
Reality
This is not the first time Lewandowski used physical violence on the campaign trail. He is turning out to be Trump’s #1 thug.
Protests at Trump rallies do not occur in a vacuum. Since he first announced his candidacy, Trump continues to make racist, sexist, and authoritarian remarks that marginalizes anyone who do not meet his view of white and conservative enough. A full list of protests can be found here.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump swaggered into Arizona again Saturday, repeating his promises to build a border wall, renegotiate U.S. trade deals and generally “make America great again.”
Wearing a blue jacket and red golf hat as he addressed the thousands gathered in Fountain Hills Park, Trump made a final pitch ahead of Arizona’s presidential primary on Tuesday.
“Go out on Tuesday and vote. I will never let you down,” he told the crowd, which had waited for hours in warm sunshine. He referred to them as a “loud, noisy majority.”
Trump was joined on stage by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, former Gov. Jan Brewer and Treasurer Jeff DeWit. Former Arizona lawmaker and 9/11 “truther” Karen Johnson prayed to open the event.
Trump’s arrival was delayed by protesters who blockaded one of the main traffic arteries into Fountain Hills. And he was in a fighting mood as he deployed his signature name-calling.
Trump’s angry tone endured throughout his shorter-than-usual 30-minute speech, which also focused on immigration-related themes.
“I want to tell you so much about illegal immigration, and so much has been mentioned about it and talked about it,” Trump said. “And these politicians are all talk, no action, they’re never going to do anything. They only picked it up because when I went and when I announced I’m running for president, I said, ‘you know, this country has a big, big problem with illegal immigration.’ And all of a sudden, we started talking about it and then had lots of bad things happening. Crime all over the place and for the first time people saw what was going on.”
Trump’s rallies have consistently been targets of protesters who oppose his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States and his hard-line positions on immigration and rhetoric, such as when he called Mexican immigrants drug runners and rapists.
At times during Trump’s speech, protesters, who stood in a fenced area of the park, chanted in competition with supporters.
Early in Trump’s speech, a protester scuffled with supporters after he unfurled a banner reading, “Vets to Trump: End hate speech against Muslims.” Two Trump supporters slapped down the banner and the man was quickly escorted from the rally.
When James Troup decided to attend a Donald Trump rally in Dayton, Ohio, he knew that there was bound to be more than a bit of factually inaccurate fear mongering, but he never expected to see a crowd literally calling for the murder of protestors.
While Troup himself went to the rally merely to watch the spectacle of it all, he described a number of protestors being dragged out of the venue much to the delight of Trump’s supporters. According to Troup, a black man, his race compelled Trump’s staffers to assign him a security buffer of sorts in the event that the crowd decided to turn on him during the event.
“The scariest part was the crowd,” Troup described in a series of posts to Facebook. “They loved everything that was being said. The calls for the wall. The calls to blow up oil fields. The calls to torture and kill people.”
Throughout the event, Trump fired the crowd up describing the necessity of erecting a wall between the U.S. and Mexico in addition to taking a firm stance in support of torturing enemies of the state.
Trump’s rambling speech was repeatedly drowned out by the crowd’s roaring cheers that were noticeably peppered with a number of racial slurs directed at Latino people and President Barack Obama.
Troup managed to peacefully stand his ground during the bulk of the event until, once more black protestors had been kicked out, Trump supporters focused on him.
“The worst part was when their venom turned toward me,” Troup wrote. “There were protestors around me who got ushered out, and then people started pointing at me, motioning for the Secret Service to ‘get him out of there.’ Now mind you, I hadn’t uttered a single word the entire rally, but people still said things like ‘Well what about this one? He needs to go too!’”
Ultimately, Troup left the event feeling as if he’d witnessed something darker and more insidious than a simple political rally.
“At that rally, I saw the scary underbelly of America I saw unadulterated hate, fueled by intentional misinformation,” Troup said. “These people who, just 2 hours ago, seemed like good and kind people, were now cheering for blood.”
