The Donald Trump campaign on Saturday released its first “emergency” fund-raising email, in response to an ad blitz from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
“Right now we’re facing an emergency goal of $100,000 to help get our ads on the air. We need your contribution by 11:59 P.M. Tonight,” the email from Team Trump said.
“Crooked Hillary is about to invade your TV with ads attacking Mr. Trump. But we’re preparing to fight back,” it reads.
The email promises to release ads attacking Clinton on her role in Benghazi, the integrity of her donors and reported FBI probing of her private email server while secretary of state.
The urgent fundraising email is routine for most presidential campaigns. But it’s particularly notable since Trump insisted repeatedly during the GOP primary season that he was self-funding his campaign, only to start asking for donations later on.
Republican officials and activists are increasingly concerned that Trump is underestimating the fundraising challenge ahead as he faces off against Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Despite the Trump campaign’s urgent appeal for campaign donations on Saturday afternoon he raised the prospect of paying for his general election bid himself. At a Las Vegas rally, he argued that if GOP establishment types didn’t fully support his campaign he could self-fund, rather than relying on the party apparatus to help bring in donations.
“Life is like two way street, right?” Trump said. “Otherwise I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. I’ll just keep funding my own campaign. I’m ok with that. That’s the easy way. I mean for me, that’s the easy way. But, hopefully I can continue to go the way we’re going, and this weekend we raised a lot of money. We’ve raised a lot of money for the Republican Party. We’ll keep doing it, because we do have tremendous support within the party that I can tell you.”
With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, he’s rejected almost every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other candidates.
Donald Trump’s campaign co-chairman says Republicans should either unite behind their party’s presumptive presidential nominee or shut up.
Sam Clovis, speaking on CNN’s New Day said:
The leadership of the Republican Party needs to figure out what they want.
Either they want to get behind the presumptive nominee who will be the nominee of this party and make sure that we do everything we can to win in November, or we’re just asking them, if they can’t do that, then just shut the hell up.
The quote from the Trump aide is in-line with Donald Trump himself. Earlier in the week Trump told a rally in Atlanta, Georgia that his Republican critics should be quiet and don’t talk or he’ll go it alone.
Media
Donald Trump campaign co-chair: If the GOP can't get behind Trump, we're asking them to "shut the hell up" https://t.co/GgU7XkYhSM
Businessman Donald Trump had a message for Republican leaders: “Just please be quiet. Don’t talk.”
While closing his speech on Wednesday in Atlanta, Trump was lamenting what he called weakness from his GOP colleagues. Trump made clear that he wasn’t going to try to bridge the gap between those in the party that support him and those that don’t.
“You know the Republicans, honestly folks… our leaders have to get tougher. This is too tough to do it alone, but you know what I think I’m going to be forced to. I think I’m going to be forced to.”
And for his Republican critics, Trump had more to say:
“And be quiet. Just please be quiet. Don’t talk. Please be quiet. Just be quiet, to the leaders, because they have to get tougher, they have to get sharper, they have to get smarter.”
Party unity is, once again, not a meal on Trump’s campaign dinner menu. The comments came right after Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of reliably Democratic Maryland, announced that he would not vote for Trump.
But Trump’s comments were ostensibly aimed at House Speaker Paul Ryan, who was extremely critical of Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the country and said he would continue to speak out when he disagreed with him. Ryan’s office did not directly address Trump’s request for silence and referred to his comments earlier in the week.
Donald Trump said Wednesday in a tweet that he would meet with the National Rifle Association to discuss “not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or no fly list, to buy guns.”
I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.
If the presumptive Republican nominee follows through, it would appear to put him on roughly the same side of the issue as President Obama and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
But it’s also possible that Trump’s position, so far described only in a tweet, will be closer to a long-held Republican position—which sounds identical on paper, but is very different in implementation.
Here’s the issue. Most Democrats support banning anyone on the FBI watch list from purchasing a weapon, full stop.
While Trump’s proposal to ban suspected terrorists is a from purchasing a firearm is a common-sense approach to gun safety (and something the Democrats have been pushing a long time for) unfortunately it would have done little to prevent the shooting in Orlando.
Keep in mind, people on the terrorist watch list are still able to legally purchase guns because on December 3rd, 2015, U.S. Senate Republicans blocked legislation that would have prevented known or suspected terrorists from buying guns.
Donald Trump said he was right to imply that President Obama is an ISIS sympathizer.
In an attempt to defend his controversial claims that the president supports the terrorist group, the presumptive Republican nominee tweeted a story from anti-Obama website Breitbart.com that cites a newly discovered “secret” memo the website says proves Obama is an ISIS supporter.
The memo, as it turns out, is neither secret nor does it demonstrate the administration’s support for ISIS or any other policy. Indeed, it’s a recently declassified and heavily redacted intelligence field report from August 2012 about the worsening security situation in Iraq, obtained by the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
Breitbart falsely concludes that because the memo mentions that al Qaeda in Iraq (a precursor to ISIS) is fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Obama administration therefore supports ISIS.
The Obama administration, particularly through its State Department, has spoken at length about the complicated process of vetting the array of opposition groups in order to avoid supporting those with ties to extremism.
An: Media fell all over themselves criticizing what DonaldTrump "may have insinuated about @POTUS." But he's right: https://t.co/bIIdYtvZYw
White House spokesman Josh Earnest Monday responded to a question about Trump’s claims the same day. “Well, I think what is clear is, if you take a look at the president’s record, it speaks for itself,” Earnest said. “And that record includes a lot of dead terrorists.”
The Washington Post did an enormous fact-check and came to the conclusion that the Brietbart.com article was a pack of crap. This should come to the surprise of no-one who reads Brietbart.com and can recognize it as dishonest and willfully deceptive. For more information you can read the fact-check here, but in the Washington Post’s expert summary:
“This is what happens when people with little understanding of policy or context choose to willfully misinterpret documents. This is a relatively unimportant memo, with little information not in newspapers at the time. Rather than showing that the Obama administration is supporting terrorist groups, the information in the memo demonstrates why the administration was so reluctant to back rebel groups in Syria, often to the annoyance of Republican hawks.
Moreover, the memo was not sent directly to Clinton’s office, as asserted by Breitbart.
Trump, as a presumptive presidential nominee, really needs to rely on more accurate information when making factual claims.”
This all stems from Donald Trump’s debunked rekindling of the old conservative trope that President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim hellbent on overthrowing the government. Donald Trump said:
Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said on Fox News. “And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.
Donald Trump says he is “revoking” the Washington Post’s press access at his campaign events because the newspaper is “phony and dishonest.”
In a Facebook post, the presumptive GOP nominee attributed the decision to the newspaper’s “incredibly inaccurate coverage” of him:
Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post.
Trump expanded on that in a statement released Monday night. Here it is, in full:
The Washington Post unfortunately covers Mr. Trump very inaccurately. Today’s headline, “Donald Trump Suggests President Obama Was Involved With Orlando Shooting” is a perfect example. We no longer feel compelled to work with a publication which has put its need for “clicks” above journalistic integrity.
They have no journalistic integrity and write falsely about Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump does not mind a bad story, but it has to be honest. The fact is, The Washington Post is being used by the owners of Amazon as their political lobbyist so that they don’t have to pay taxes and don’t get sued for monopolistic tendencies that have led to the destruction of department stores and the retail industry.
The Post’s executive editor Marty Baron responded:
“Donald Trump’s decision to revoke The Washington Post’s press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press. When coverage doesn’t correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along — honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly. We’re proud of our coverage, and we’re going to keep at it.”
Monday’s announcement was an astonishing move by the Trump campaign, given the Post’s status as one of the most respected newsrooms in the United States.
But it follows a pattern. Trump has repeatedly refused to give press credentials to major news outlets when he disagrees with coverage decisions.
Reporters who do not receive press credentials are sometimes still able to attend Trump events as members of the general public. But sometimes the denial of press credentials restricts access altogether.
BuzzFeed, Politico, The Daily Beast, Univision, and The Huffington Post are among other outlets that have been blocked in recent months. Some journalists have described this as an emerging Trump “blacklist.”
The Huffington Post tweeted at The Post on Monday afternoon and said “Welcome to the club.”
The White House Correspondents Association, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders all issued statements criticizing the campaign’s decision.
Why’d Trump do it? He was apparently outraged by a headline on a Post story that summarized comments he made about the shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
“I am no fan of President Obama, but to show you how dishonest the phony Washington Post is, they wrote, ‘Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting’ as their headline,” Trump wrote. “Sad!”
That headline was the result of an interview Trump gave to Fox News on Monday morning.
“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said of Obama. “And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”
Trump’s remarks about Obama were widely interpreted to be sinister in nature.
CNNPolitics described Trump’s comments as a “conspiracy theory” and said it is “similar to how Trump talked about Obama when Trump was leading the ‘birther’ attacks against the president five years ago.”
The Post later adjusted its story to make the headline tamer. The headline now reads, “Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.”
Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for the Post, told CNNMoney that the headline was changed “shortly after it posted to more properly reflect what Trump said.”
“We did so on our own; the Trump campaign never contacted us about it,” Coratti said.
The Post — like many other news outlets — has had a simultaneously close and contentious relationship with Trump.
Its reporters have regularly interviewed Trump and published scoops about his campaign.
But at the same time, the paper has been on the receiving end of the candidate’s anti-press tirades. Trump said in December that the Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, bought the paper as part of a tax scam. Trump repeated the charge last month, saying that Bezos is “using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed.”
Speaking at a conference earlier this month, Bezos decried Trump for trying to “chill the media.”
A wide range of press freedom advocates have said similar things about Trump’s insults and actions, even as some GOP voters have cheered him on.
Last week, for example, BuzzFeed DC bureau chief John Stanton said he was prohibited from attending Trump’s primary night press event. The prior day, BuzzFeed had announced that it would refuse to accept Trump campaign ads. But the campaign’s refusal to grant the web site press credentials dates back many months.
Stanton tweeted that he “wasn’t even let on the premises of Trump’s golf course for his press conference.”
Trump’s announcement on Monday was met with a chorus of opposition from members of the news media.
Politico editor Susan Glasser called it a “violation of the basic right of a free press to report.”
David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for National Public Radio, said that Trump “loves the media’s attention and hates the media’s reporting.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement, “A candidate for the highest elected office in the land doesn’t get to choose what goes into a newspaper.”
It added that Trump’s actions “provides a ready made excuse for authoritarian leaders to crack down further on independent journalists.”
The roll of a free press is paramount to our liberty and separates us from authoritarian regimes, like Russia, who have state-run press. The job of journalists — at The Post and everywhere else — is to give voters the fullest and most accurate picture of the two people who want to represent all of us as president.
The problem with what Trump is doing is that he is revoking access because he disagrees with the coverage. Not because the Washington Post has the facts wrong. It’s because he doesn’t like how the facts are being presented.
Do you think that the Trump supporters who would defend the 2nd amendment to the death would do the same to the 1st? Apparently not.
Brietbart: “Bezos (WaPo’s owner) has defended the paper’s ongoing delving into Trump while it does’t appear that the paper has devoted similar resources to investigating Democratic Party presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton.”
Fox News: “The Washington Post story featured comments Trump made earlier in the day on Fox News, when he made a made a vague statement about Obama interpreted by some as a reference to his sympathies.”
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 seemed to suggest that President Barack Obama had an ulterior motive concerning how he addresses and handles terror attacks, because he does not say the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Trump said Monday morning on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends”:
We’re led by a man who is very — look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. And the something else in mind, you know, people can’t believe it.
People cannot believe, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and he can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.
Asked earlier why he had tweeted that Obama should resign because he wouldn’t say the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said:
He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. It’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.
A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for an explanation of what Trump meant. But asked on NBC’s “Today Show” about the comments, Trump said that “a lot of people” thought Obama does not want to understand terrorism.
Well, there a lot of people who think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it, he doesn’t want to see what’s really happening.
And later, speaking to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Trump offered yet another explanation when questioned about what he meant.
I can’t define it. Nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody knows why (Obama) doesn’t have more anger, more competitive zeal. It’s almost like he’s falling asleep.
Trump has been on the defense since tweeting Sunday that he did not need congratulations for being “right” about the Orlando nightclub shooting. On Sunday, Trump tweeted that Obama should resign for not using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.” Obama dubbed the shooting an “act of terror” and an “act of hate” in his response Sunday afternoon.
Reality
So instead of thinking diplomatically on foreign affairs and having a tangible policy, Trump instead turns to an old baseless conservative political smear from 2007 that Obama is a covert Muslim extremist.
For those who may be too young or have forgotten, Fox News was famous for their political smears against the then-Senator Obama saying things like:
None of these hand any kernel of truth. So it came to no surprise when Fox News defended Trump, writing:
The Washington Post story featured comments Trump made earlier in the day on Fox News, when he made a made a vague statement about Obama interpreted by some as a reference to his sympathies.
Interpreted by some? Excuse me? If Donald Trump was not trying to infer the right-wing conspiracy theory that President Obama does not act because he is an undercover Muslim, can Fox News please try to come up with a plausible explanation of what Trump was actually talking about?
Finally, Trump took the opportunity to bring up the old conservative trope that Obama refuses to acknowledge terrorism, and until he does we’ll be vulnerable to terrorists… or something. However there is a very good reason why President Obama, and before him George W. Bush, will not speak the words “radical Islamic terrorism” when referring to terrorist groups like ISIS. They may sound like small words to Republican critics like Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, but they have big meaning. The members of ISIS and other terrorist groups are desperate for legitimacy. This is why ISIS calls themselves the “Islamic State.” They try to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam. And they propagate the notion that America, and the West, is at war with Islam. For a President of the United States to infer that we are at war with the Islamic religion, it would have immediate consequences from our Muslim allies in the middle-east as well as give terrorist groups the legitimacy they exactly desire.
Donald Trump wasted little time seeking political advantage in the massacre at a Florida nightclub, taking credit for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism” in the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history.
The suspect in the attack, identified by authorities as a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent named Omar Saddiqui Mateen, killed 50 people and injured another 53 during a rampage through a gay dance club in Orlando. He died in a gunfight with SWAT officers after initially firing shots into the club and later taking hostages.
FBI special-agent-in-charge Ron Hopper told reporters that Mateen had been interviewed twice in 2013 after he made comments to co-workers about potential ties to terror groups, and another time in 2014. Just before his bloody rampage on Sunday Mateen called 911 to proclaim “allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State,” Hopper said.
Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!
Trump followed up that tweet with a statement expressing his “deepest sympathy and support” for “the victims, the wounded, and their families.”
But he also attacked President Barack Obama, whom he said “disgracefully refused to even say the words ‘Radical Islam'” during his comments on Sunday afternoon. “For that reason alone, he should step down.”
Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn't he should immediately resign in disgrace!
Obama condemned the attack as “an act of terror and an act of hate,” but declined to identify a motive. “We’ve reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer,” the president said. “The FBI is appropriately investigating this as an act of terrorism, and I’ve directed that we must spare no effort to determine what, if any, inspiration or association this killer may have had with terrorist groups.”
Trump also went after his Democratic rival for the White House, writing, “If Hillary Clinton, after this attack, still cannot say the two words ‘Radical Islam’ she should get out of this race for the Presidency.”
“If we do not get tough and smart real fast, we are not going to have a country anymore,” Trump continued. “Because our leaders are weak, I said this was going to happen – and it is only going to get worse. I am trying to save lives and prevent the next terrorist attack. We can’t afford to be politically correct anymore.”
Trump then noted the killer’s ethnicity and religious faith, citing Pew statistics showing that “99% of people in Afghanistan support oppressive Sharia Law.”
He accused Clinton of wanting to “dramatically increase admissions from the Middle East, bringing in many hundreds of thousands during a first term,” warning that “hundreds of migrants and their children have been implicated in terrorism in the United States” since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “We will have no way to screen them, pay for them, or prevent the second generation from radicalizing.”
“We need to protect all Americans, of all backgrounds and all beliefs, from Radical Islamic Terrorism – which has no place in an open and tolerant society,” Trump concluded. “Radical Islam advocates hate for women, gays, Jews, Christians and all Americans. I am going to be a President for all Americans, and I am going to protect and defend all Americans. We are going to make America safe again and great again for everyone.”
Earlier on Sunday, Trump was the first remaining presidential candidate to speak about the massacre, tweeting about the “really bad shooting in Orlando.”
“Police investigating possible terrorism. Many people dead and wounded,” he wrote.
After the death toll had risen from an estimated to 20 to a confirmed 50 with dozens more injured, Trump tweeted again, offering his condolences and urging the U.S. to “get tough.”
“Horrific incident in FL. Praying for all the victims & their families,” he said. “When will this stop? When will we get tough, smart & vigilant?”
Minutes before President Barack Obama spoke, Trump tweeted:
Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn't he should immediately resign in disgrace!
Donald Trump was quick to congratulate himself over 50 dead Americans, then continued on with his anti-immigrant speech. Trump then spent the rest of the day with tweet after tweet disseminating unverified information.
It looks like Trump flagrantly copy & pasted @SebGorka's unsourced 2:03pm tweet, tweaked it, and posted at 2:52pm pic.twitter.com/aAHWUHvvnH
This could very well be a case of domestic terrorism, but as the day progressed and more information became available another possible motive arose as a hate crime against the LGBT community. The shooter’s father said that his son was angered after seeing two men kissing on the street months ago. More information later came in that the shooter was not mentally stable and was not at all religious or interested in religion.
Donald Trump claims we have to be smart but (and this is important but completely lost on Donald Trump) the investigation is still way too early to jump to his conclusions. That’s not at all smart.
Finally, Trump took the opportunity to bring up the old conservative trope that Obama refuses to acknowledge terrorism, and until he does we’ll be vulnerable to terrorists… or something. However there is a very good reason why President Obama, and before him George W. Bush, will not speak the words “radical Islamic terrorism” when referring to terrorist groups like ISIS. They may sound like small words to Republican critics like Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, but they have big meaning. The members of ISIS and other terrorist groups are desperate for legitimacy. This is why ISIS calls themselves the “Islamic State.” They try to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam. And they propagate the notion that America, and the West, is at war with Islam. For a President of the United States to infer that we are at war with the Islamic religion, it would have immediate consequences from our Muslim allies in the middle-east as well as give terrorist groups the legitimacy they exactly want.
