“Tell Donald Trump: Hate is not an American value,” Hillary Clinton wrote on her Twitter page.The “super PAC” supporting Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, unveiled its first ad attacking Mr. Trump, and the White House said Mr. Trump had disqualified himself from serving as president.
But the castigation was far from unanimous: Mr. Trump was applauded by some conservative commentators, who said he reflected the electorate’s views more honestly than the party’s leaders.
“Anyone who thinks @realDonaldTrump comments will hurt him don’t know the temperature of the American ppl,” the radio host Laura Ingraham wrote on Twitter.
Senator Ted Cruz, who is vying for much the same base of support that Mr. Trump now enjoys, disavowed his proposal but pointedly declined to join in the scolding.
“I commend Donald Trump for standing up and focusing America’s attention on the need to secure our borders,” Mr. Cruz said at the Capitol.
And former Senator Rick Santorum, the winner of the 2012 Iowa caucus, seemed to embrace Mr. Trump’s impulse but differed on the details. “I’ve proposed actual concrete things and immigration law that would have — not the effect of banning all Muslims, but a lot of them because we need to get rid of the visa lottery system, which is the way in which a lot of radicals have come into this country,” he said on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily.”
Mr. Trump, who has set the tone in a Republican presidential race he has led for months, defended and expanded upon his proposal in a string of television interviews Tuesday morning.
In a sometimes tense exchange with Joe Scarborough on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” he insisted that fears of terrorism had made policing difficult in places like London and in Paris, the site of the Islamic State attacks on Nov. 13 that killed 130 people.
“Paris is no longer the same city it was,” he said, before adding, without citing any evidence: “They have sections in Paris that are radicalized where the police refuse to go there. They’re petrified. The police refuse to go in there. We have places in London and other places that are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives.”
Mr. Trump’s statement about Paris has no basis in fact: There are no districts there or outside Paris where the police have said they are unwilling to go. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, meanwhile, said that Mr. Trump’s claim about his city was “complete and utter nonsense.” Saying crime was falling in London and New York, he added: “The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”
In the same MSNBC interview, Mr. Trump cited Roosevelt’s classification of thousands of Japanese, Germans and Italians living in the United States during the war as “enemy aliens.” He said he was not endorsing something as drastic as the camps where American citizens of Japanese descent were interned. Instead, he referred to three proclamations by which Roosevelt authorized government detention of immigrants, and which led to the internment of thousands of noncitizen Japanese, Germans and Italians.
“This is a president highly respected by all; he did the same thing,” Mr. Trump said. The nation was at war in the 1940s, he said, and it is now “at war with radical Islam.”
On ABC, Mr. Trump clarified that his proposal would not apply to United States citizens. “If a person is a Muslim, goes overseas and comes back, they can come back,” he said. “They’re a citizen. That’s different. But we have to figure things out.”
There was sweeping criticism of Mr. Trump’s remarks from European officials and from Democrats.
“The fact is that what Donald Trump said yesterday disqualifies him from serving as president, and for Republican candidates for president to stand by their pledge to support Mr. Trump, that in and of itself is disqualifying,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters at his daily briefing.
Mr. Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, went further. “Trump is saying out loud what other Republicans merely suggest,” he said on the Senate floor.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told Bloomberg News on Tuesday evening that because of Mr. Trump’s “dangerous” comments, if he wins the nomination Mrs. Clinton will “win in a walk.”
Mr. Trump’s proposal on Monday came hours after a poll was released showing that Mr. Cruz had overtaken him for the lead in Iowa, and a day after President Obama gave a rare Oval Office address to discuss fears of terrorism after the attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, Calif. — a speech Republicans criticized as insufficiently reassuring.
“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement.
It was the latest controversy from a candidate whose campaign has been marked by harsh comments about some immigrant groups since he entered the race in June. Despite repeated and often hopeful predictions from his rivals and political analysts that his supporters would abandon him, such remarks have appeared to cleave Mr. Trump’s backers closer to him.
“We have to get a hand around a very serious problem,” Mr. Trump said on MSNBC. “And it’s getting worse. And you will have more World Trade Centers and you will have more, bigger than the World Trade Center, if we don’t toughen up, smarten up, and use our heads.”
Credit: Nytimes
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