Donald Trump has hit the
reset button with the massacre in Orlando.
Forget about his racist comments about Indiana judge Gonzalo Curiel, the terror attack has saved him from that issue.
His campaign is now focused on our porous borders and a president that won’t even use the term “radical Islam.” This issue is right in his political wheelhouse.
“I called for a ban after San Bernardino ... many are saying that I was right to do so,” Trump said during a rally in New Hampshire yesterday. “I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States.
“We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country,” Trump adding, saying “the bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here. That is a fact.”
Trump should now be laser focused on Obama’s lackadaisical approach to defeating ISIS and preventing lone-wolf attacks. It’s Obama’s FBI that failed us here in Boston before the marathon bombings and now in Orlando. The FBI had their sites on Omar Mateen and dropped the ball.
This is not the time to be soft on terrorists and even though Trump’s brash comments sometimes feel unsettling, it is better than the alternative — a president that allowed ISIS to grow under his watch and still refuses to define the threats at home because he’s afraid of offending people.
Hillary Clinton was smart to distance herself from Obama yesterday when she was willing to call the weekend’s mass shooting spree “radical Islamism.”
“From my perspective, it matters what we do more than what we say,” Clinton said on CNN’s “New Day.” “And it mattered we got bin Laden, not what name we called him. I have clearly said we — whether you call it radical jihadism or radical Islamism, I’m happy to say either. I think they mean the same thing.”
Later in the day during a national security speech in Cleveland she told a crowd, “As president, I will make identifying and stopping lone wolves a top priority.”
The news media might be fixated on this tragedy for now, but it will be up to Trump to keep them focused on the issue of defeating terrorism and not on his politically incorrect comments.
