begin quote from:
Trump stretches facts in fiery post-Orlando speech
| CNN | - |
(CNN)
Donald Trump responded Monday 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.
Trump stretches facts in fiery post-Orlando speech
Story highlights
- Trump's speech isn't the first time he has sought to capitalize politically on a terror attack
- The GOP candidate is doubling down on controversial policies for dealing with terror
(CNN)Donald
Trump responded Monday 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."
Moments from Clinton and Trump's CNN face-off 01:35
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."
Trump's
claim that a "tremendous flow" of Syrian refugees was pouring into the
country free of screening also seemed to be an exaggeration.
Entries
have risen in recent months but the process has been painstaking for
many of those hoping to win refuge in America and have to submit to a
months-long vetting process.
Since
May 1, 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.
Watch Donald Trump evolve on banning Muslim immigration 01:24
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.
"She wants to take away Americans' guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us," Trump said.
Clinton
has called for universal background checks and stricter controls on
firearms, but has never called for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment.
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."
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