During his speech, Trump gave the false impression that immigrants who enter the United States as refugees and asylum seekers aren’t subject to background checks. Without citing any convincing evidence, he accused Clinton of supporting “policies that bring the threat of radical Islam into America, and allow it to grow overseas.” He reaffirmed his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States, which is popular among Republican voters, and he suggested that Muslim communities in this country need to do more to coöperate with law enforcement and turn in “the bad guys,” claiming, again without any basis, that “they do know where they are.”
.. Although he was speaking from a teleprompter, the tone in which he delivered his address was so disdainful that it was hard to concentrate on the actual words.
.. In a post on Sunday, my colleague David Remnick lamented the “velocity, vapidity, and sheer ugliness” of Trump’s initial response to the Orlando tragedy: a series of tweets drawing attention to himself and seeking to build capital from the attack.
.. But even in a party that has cynically exploited voters’ fears for decades, there is rising concern about where Trump is going. On Monday, he came close to suggesting that a President who oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden, who has greatly expanded the use of drone strikes against targets in foreign countries, and whose approval rating recently edged above fifty per cent, is a closet Islamist sympathizer.
Decoding Donald Trump
When he was pressed later about the meaning of his comments, Trump offered a dismissive rhetorical shrug. “I’ll let people figure that out for themselves,” he said.
.. He called it a “temporary” ban, but that’s a lie. Trump said the ban would be lifted when Muslims and other immigrants can be screened “perfectly,” but that will never happen, and Trump has to know that.
Is Trump Losing the GOP?
Never before have so many leading Republican figures questioned the nominee’s basic fitness for office.
In 1800, the first genuinely competitive election, allies of Vice President Thomas Jefferson said President John Adams possessed a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” For his part, Jefferson was labeled “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father”—not to mention an “atheist” and “whoremaster.”
.. The hard questions about the character and temperament of the presumptive Republican nominee are coming from within his own party, at precisely the time when the most important piece of business for a nominee is consolidation.
.. He’s implying something else: that Trump would not listen to his military, that he’d turn a diplomatic dispute into a casus belli; that he is not to be trusted with the power of the presidency not because of what he thinks, but because of how he behaves.
.. It is rooted in the idea that Trump has the instincts of a narcissistic bully, unable to even imagine that anyone might have a reasonable basis for disagreeing with him
.. What is haunting a significant number of Republicans is that they are on the verge of putting someone in the Oval Office whose character and temperament make him unfit for the job.
.. Unlike so many in the GOP base, who see in Trump’s behavior a fearless willingness to take on a corrupt political system, these Republicans are seeing signs that he is a dangerous figure, not for what he thinks, but for who he is. And no amount of speeches read from a Teleprompter reciting anodyne pieties is likely to change that.
Democrats unleash coordinated barrage against Trump
Obama, Clinton, Sanders and down-ballot Democrats deliver withering takedowns of the presumptive Republican nominee.
.. “Not once has an adviser said, ‘Man, if we use that phrase, we are going to turn this whole thing around.’ Not once,” Obama said, speaking from the Treasury Department following a counter-Islamic State meeting. “So if someone seriously thinks that we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who we’ve taken off the battlefield.”
.. Ryan, who called Muslims “our partners.” “And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test, not a religious test.”
.. Trump, in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that will air Tuesday evening, boasted that he shamed Clinton into saying “radical Islamism” on Monday.
.. “Yes, she was shamed into it by me, and that’s because of the pressure I put on her,” Trump told Hannity
.. “But in this instance, Donald’s words are especially nonsensical because the terrorist who carried out this attack wasn’t born in Afghanistan, as Donald Trump said yesterday,” she continued. “He was born in Queens, New York, just like Donald was himself.