‘Profiling’ needed to fight terrorism: Trump

• Donald Trump called Monday for authorities to engage in racial profiling to more effectively fight the threat of terrorist attacks in the United States.

“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are. They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of, uh, profiling. And they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News.

Trump concluded: “Do we have a choice? Look what’s going on. Do we really have a choice? We’re tying to be so politically correct in our country.”

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton meanwhile cast herself as the most qualified to combat terrorism and argued that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is helping Islamic militants recruit new fighters.

Clinton touted her national security credentials at a hastily arranged news conference outside her campaign plane, accusing Trump of using the incidents to make “some kind of demagogic point.”

“I’m the only candidate in this race who’s been part of the hard decisions to take terrorists off the battlefield,” Clinton, a former secretary of state, told reporters.

Monday was not the first time Trump called for racial profiling.

“But look, we have — whether it’s racial profiling or politically correct, we’d better get smart,” he said at a town hall in August. “We are letting tens of thousands of people into our country. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”

On Saturday night, as initial reports about an explosion in Manhattan were still coming in and before the authorities had announced the details, Trump told supporters at a rally that a “bomb” had gone off in New York. On Monday, he bragged about his choice of words.

“What I said is exactly correct. I should be a newscaster because I called it before the news,” Trump said.