Trump broadens proposal to ban immigrants and refugees in Orlando aftermath

Donald Trump broke out an old attack line against President Obama on Monday, suggesting that there’s “something going on” with an American leader who avoids blaming “radical Islamic terrorism” for events like the Orlando massacre.

The country is “led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said in an interview Monday morning with Fox News. “And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it.... 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 did not clarify what he meant, but he has previously flirted with theories that Obama is actually Muslim. During the last election cycle, he repeatedly suggested that Obama was hiding his birth certificate because it might identify him as a Muslim. Even after Obama released the long-form version of his birth certificate, Trump tweeted about the “black Muslim in the White House.”

Some Republicans have suggested that Trump would move away from espousing such theories once the GOP primaries ended. But Monday’s statements made clear that he does not plan such a switch and is likely to continue making such appeals on into the general election.

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Donald Trump announced Monday that he was revoking media credentials from the Washington Post, another sign that he does not tolerate criticism that often comes with presidential campaigns.

Trump has previously banned Politico, BuzzFeed, the Daily Beast, the Des Moines Register and other publications from attending his press events and rallies. But the Post ban is new territory, given the paper’s historic role in covering campaigns and setting the nation’s political agenda.

Trump did not specify his reasons for revoking the Post’s credentials, and his press secretary did not immediately respond to an email. But in a Facebook post earlier Monday, Trump complained about a headline on a story related to television interviews Trump gave about the Orlando, Fla., attack.

“I am no fan of President Obama,” Trump wrote, “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. Sad!”

That headline on the online post appears to have changed; it currently reads: “Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.”

The interview the story reported on was one on Fox News in which Trump said Obama “doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.”

“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said at another point. “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 has a history of raising unfounded speculation about Obama, including referring to debunked conspiracies that the president was not born in the United States.

He has often used the media as a foil, calling them sleazy and dishonest, a tactic that has excited his fans and insulated from some criticism he has faced, particularly during the Republican primaries.

In a statement later in the day, Trump accused the Post of putting “its need for ‘clicks’ above journalistic integrity.” He repeated a charge he has leveled before, without evidence, that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who is also the founder and chief executive of Amazon, wants to use the paper to lobby for government policies that would favor the tech company.

Donald Trump tried to claim the mantle of unity and inclusiveness — while simultaneously calling for an expansion of his ban against Muslim immigrants — in a scathing speech Monday in the aftermath of the Orlando massacre.

Trump offered few policy specifics, mostly attacking Hillary Clinton and President Obama for mismanagement, political correctness and what he portrayed as liberal immigration policy.

His most notable policy shift involved a further extension of his indefinite ban on Muslims entering the country to include even more people.

“When I am elected, I will suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies, until we fully understand how to end these threats,” he said.

Trump also continued to lambaste Clinton over immigration and Obama over what he portrayed as incompetence and lack of will. He said he would replace nation-building with a focus on terrorism and use the savings on domestic programs. He strongly opposed Clinton’s call for tighter gun policies.

“She wants to take away Americans’ guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us,” Trump said.

He also gave himself credit for forcing Clinton to use the words “radical Islam,” an issue he asserts is key to confronting terrorism.

“She supports so much of what is wrong,” Trump said. “She has no clue, in my opinion, what radical Islam is and she won’t speak honestly about it if she does in fact know.”

Trump read the speech from a teleprompter in front of eight American flags before the press and about 150 invited dignitaries, including former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, at St. Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester. The walls of the intimate venue are covered with large pictures of the many presidential candidates who have long treated the college as a near-mandatory stop during the primary season.

New Hampshire is also a swing state in the general election. The St. Anselm speech had been planned as a broadside against Clinton’s history in public life but was changed after the shooting in Orlando, Fla., and Trump also canceled a rally in Portsmouth, N.H., that had been scheduled for the afternoon.

Trump’s tonal shift in the speech was especially notable. Trump has railed against political correctness and drawn accusations of intolerance. But he insisted that it was he, not Clinton, who is truly a friend of women and gays.

“Ask yourself, who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community, Donald Trump with actions, or Hillary Clinton with her words?” Trump said. “Clinton wants to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country — they enslave women, and they murder gays.”

Despite those words, Trump’s speech was far different from Clinton’s own earlier in the day. She talked about the nation coming together as it did after Sept. 11, citing President George W. Bush’s outreach to Muslim Americans and allies. The attempt at unifying language was also a slight departure from Trump’s tweets and comments since the attacks, when he even suggested Obama is complicit in terrorism, a striking accusation for a presumptive nominee to make about a sitting president.

“There are a lot of people who think he maybe doesn’t want to get it, who think he maybe 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 who think he doesn’t want to get it, he doesn’t want to see what’s happening,” Trump said on the “Today” show.

Trump also veered from his prepared remarks in his speech, saying the New York-born gunman in Sunday’s attack in Orlando was born in “an Afghan,” a nod to the man’s heritage. The statement goes to the heart of Trump’s argument, however, that a broad immigration ban will stop terrorism.

Trump defended his immigration plans as a fight for American values, including tolerance. At the same time, he cast a wide net over an entire group of cultures.

“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,” he said. “Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions.”

The White House is not about to dignify Donald Trump with a response.

Asked about the presumptive Republican nominee’s attacks on how President Obama handled the Orlando, Fla., nightclub massacre, Press Secretary Josh Earnest dismissed Trump’s criticism.

“When you are focused on something as big as helping the country respond to the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history ... it’s important not to get distracted by things that are so small,” Earnest told reporters at his daily briefing.

Earnest did respond to questions about the administration’s rhetoric in describing the threat posed by groups like Islamic State, and why it does not refer to it as “radical Islamic terrorism” or some variation of the phrase.

The Obama administration has long contended that casting the debate in such terms legitimizes the propaganda campaign by Islamic State and other extremist groups that falsely asserts that the West is at war with all of Islam. The White House also says that using terms like “Muslim terrorism” strains relations with strategic allies like Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations.

Sen. Marco Rubio said Monday that the Orlando shooting has left him rethinking his plans -- including his decision to not seek reelection to the Senate.

“My family and I will be praying about all this, and we’ll see what I need to do next with my life in regards to how I can best serve,” Rubio told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

The Florida senator has been under pressure from Republicans to remain in the Senate after his failed presidential bid as the GOP struggles to keep a majority in Congress this fall.

Donald Trump’s turbulent presidential run is making it potentially difficult for down-ticket Republicans and Florida will be a key battleground for control of the Senate.

Rubio has insisted he will return to private life when his term ends in January, but on Monday appeared to reconsider.

The filing deadline for the Senate race is later this month.

(Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

A horrific mass murder on the scale of the Orlando, Fla., nightclub massacre early Sunday would normally cause a time-out in a presidential campaign, as the candidates pause their attacks in deference to the dead and their families.

Donald Trump, though, was prompted by the deadliest mass shooting in American history to immediately launch into some of his harshest and angriest broadsides yet, demanding President Obama resign, Hillary Clinton drop out of the presidential race, and that his call for a ban on Muslims entering the country be enforced.

As a result, the expected grieving and calls for healing on the campaign trail Monday are already expected to be overshadowed by pitched political sparring over national security and gun control as Clinton and Trump respond to the latest act of terrorism on U.S. soil in prepared remarks Monday. Early Sunday morning, a gunman killed 49 people and injured at least 53 in the Orlando nightclub before being killed in a shootout with police.

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Donald Trump doubled down Monday on labeling the Orlando mass shooting “radical Islamic terrorism,” insisting that his use of the phrase shows his get-tough approach to national security.

He also painted President Obama as unaware of the security threats facing the U.S. because he avoids the phrase.

“He thinks everyone’s just a sweetheart,” Trump said on NBC’s “Today.” “… which I think is insulting to our country and insulting to everybody.”

The White House has said it doesn’t use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” because it is an overly broad phrase that falsely implies the West is at war with all of Islam, a concept that is a basis for Islamic State propaganda.

Trump claimed credit on Sunday for predicting that terrorists will continue to attack Americans. The presumptive GOP nominee repeated Monday that he warned such an attack would happen again, but then said he didn’t want credit.

Trump also called a proposed ban on assault weapons terrible and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton “weak” and “ineffective.”

“I absolutely wouldn’t [ban assault rifles] because people need protection; they have to protect,” Trump said. “So, the bad guys will have the assault rifles and the people trying to protect themselves will be standing there with a BB gun.”

Hillary Clinton called for a debate over how to combat gun violence after the massacre in Orlando in a round of interviews Monday, acknowledging the terrorist attack but setting aside rival Donald Trump’s attacks on her and other Democrats.

Clinton dismissed Trump’s complaints about President Obama and other politicians labeling the attack as “radical jihadism” or “terrorism” as opposed to “radical Islam”; Trump called it political correctness run amok. Clinton said the words didn’t matter as much as deaths by gun violence and terrorism.

“I’m not going to demonize and demagogue and declare war on an entire religion,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Today.” “That’s just plain dangerous, and it plays into ISIS’ hands.”

In the hours after the shooting, the presumptive Democratic nominee and Republican rival Donald Trump issued starkly different statements about the tragedy. On Monday, Clinton pressed the divide, calling out Trump for attacking policymakers instead of laying out plans to combat gun violence.

“We also have to, you know, try to get this out of partisanship,” Clinton said. “It’s a moment for statesmanship.”

She called for a robust debate in Congress and the nation on gun violence and firearms regulations and insisted that assault weapons must be taken off of U.S. streets.

“I can only hope that people who are responsible gun owners will join us in this cause,” she said. “How many more of these mass tragedies do we have to live through?”

More than six in 10 Bernie Sanders voters in California already have decided to side with Hillary Clinton in the fall — albeit most of them with reservations — and many of the rest said they might support her if she adopted some of his policies and received his endorsement, according to a new statewide poll.

The findings from a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times post-election survey suggest a path to unity, however fraught, for Democrats nationally as the party attempts to bind the wounds of the lengthy primary battle.

The poll also offers no sign of Republicans being competitive in the state in the fall. Even with only partial support so far from Sanders’ voters, Clinton defeats presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, who has vowed to contest California, by 30 percentage points in a projected general-election matchup.

Sanders voters who said they would not back Clinton offered several possibilities for what might sway them.

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