Trump, the unbalanced Dump
WHEN I first heard of the shooting in which an Islamic extremist killed 49 people and injured more than 50 inside a nightclub in Florida, in the US, I groaned, “Donald Trump. Oh, Donald Frigging Trump!”
And yes, the one who wears the wig did not disappoint. He wasted no time in using the murder spree by reiterating his now trite message: if he becomes president he will limit Muslim immigration to the United States.
Sad as it is, it is an undeniable fact that the murders by Omar Mateen have become an unexpected fillip for Trump’s sputtering presidential campaign against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
In a speech on Monday in New Hampshire, Trump the Dump said he would suspend immigration from countries “where there is a proven history of terrorism” against the US.
He said radical Muslim immigrants were “trying to take over our children and convince them how wonderful Isis (Islamic State) is”.
Although Islamic State has claimed responsibility for what has gone down as the worst armed attack in US history, intelligence officials in that country have maintained that Mateen’s motives were unclear and that he had no known direct links with the Syria-based group. Mateen, they said, was likely radicalised over the internet.
In another leap of logic, Trump went on to suggest that President Barack Obama may sympathise with radicalised Muslims. He said Obama had not expressed enough anger at the attack.
But Muslim-baiting has always worked in Trump’s favour, and he knows it and is capitalising on it. When he responded to last year’s terror attacks in Paris and California with a call for banning Muslims from entering the US, he surged in the Reuters/Ipsos poll in the weeks that followed, opening up a 30-point lead over his Republican primary rivals.
Republicans continue to be strongly supportive of Trump’s approach to handling terrorism.