President blasts terrorists, stumps for wall, travel ban
JUPITER, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Friday denounced the deadly mosque attack in Egypt and reached out to its president, asserting the world must crush terrorists by military means and insisting the U.S. needs a southern border wall and the travel ban that is tied up in courts.
“Need the WALL, need the BAN!” Trump tweeted before his planned call to Egyptian President AbdelFattah el-Sissi. “God bless the people of Egypt.”
That attack’s aftermath played out as Trump mixed work and play in sunny Florida, golfing, speaking with foreign leaders and tweeting briskly.
Trump also spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, telling him that the United States will cut off its supply of arms to Kurdish fighters in Syria, a move sure to please Turkey but further alienate Syrian Kurds who bore much of the fight against the Islamic State group.
Trump said he’d “given clear instructions” that the Kurds will receive no more weapons — “and that this nonsense should have ended a long time ago,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.
The White House called the move “consistent with our previous policy” and noted the recent fall of Raqqa, once the Islamic State group’s self-declared capital. The Trump administration announced in May it would start arming the Kurds in anticipation of the fight to retake Raqqa.
Turkey considers the Kurdish Syrian fighters, known by the initials YPG, to be terrorists because of their affiliation to outlawed Kurdish rebels that have waged a three decade-long insurgency in Turkey. Yet the U.S. chose to partner with the YPG in Syria anyway, arguing that the battle-hardened Kurds were the most-effective fighting force available.
Officials at both the Pentagon and the State Department, who would normally be informed of changes in U.S. policy toward arming the Syrian Kurds, said they were unaware of any changes.
Regarding the attack in Egypt, where at least 235 people were killed when Islamic militants attacked a crowded mosque, Trump tweeted: “The world cannot tolerate terrorism. “We must defeat them militarily and discredit the extremist ideology that forms the basis of their existence!”
In his call with el-Sissi, the White House said Trump “reiterated that the United States will continue to stand with Egypt in the face of terrorism.”
Trump also used the attack to renew his call for a wall along the southern border with Mexico and his efforts to bar people from certain Muslim-majority countries from coming to the U.S.
“We have to get TOUGHER AND SMARTER than ever before, and we will,” he wrote.
Trump’s original travel ban sought to temporarily suspend the U.S. refugee program and block the entry of nationals from seven majority-Muslim counties into the U.S., but it was stopped by the courts. The administration has since made several attempts to revise the order to try to better hold up to legal scrutiny.
Trump spent more than four hours at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, where he’d earlier tweeted that he would be playing “golf (quickly) with Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson” before returning to his private Mar-a-Lago club “for talks on bringing even more jobs and companies back to the USA!”
Trump also complained again Friday about football players who kneel during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. “Can you believe that the disrespect for our Country, our Flag, our Anthem continues without penalty to the players,” Trump said, accusing NFL commissioner Roger Goodell of having “lost control” of what he called a “hemorrhaging league” where “Players are the boss!”