Speaking in the swing state of Ohio, Trump also said his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton lacks the “mental and physical stamina” to take on the Islamic State. “I call it ‘extreme vetting.’ I call it extreme, extreme, vetting”.
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“Donald Trump on Monday upped his call for action against radical Islam in an effort to reclaim the offensive on national security, proposing an ideological test to keep would-be immigrants with radical views out of the US”.
Trump’s campaign aides said the new ideological test for admission to the USA would vet applicants for their stance on issues like religious freedom, gender equality and gay rights.
“If my son were still in Iraq, and I say to all those who are there, the threat to their life has gone up a couple clicks”, said Biden, who added Trump is “totally, thoroughly unqualified” to be president.
Trump spent much of the speech building a case that Obama and Clinton are to blame for the creation of the terror group that has roiled the Middle East and carried out attacks in the West. She kept up that argument Monday as she campaigned alongside Vice President Joe Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a working class area where both have family ties.
Mr Trump has since said he was being sarcastic in accusing Mr Obama of founding IS. “The GOP nominee may have been restrained, but he wasn’t backing down”. The campaign pushed back vigorously against the claims, which were part of an investigation by Ukrainian officials into the network of now-ousted President Viktor Yanukovich, who Manafort once worked for as a political consultant.
Overall, the Manafort story provides another distraction at a particularly vulnerable time for the campaign. In that sense, his anti-terrorism speech at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, was a success for a campaign that’s suffered in recent weeks from the candidate’s own unpredictability. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial imploring Trump to demonstrably change course by Labor Day or forfeit his nomination to his running mate, Mike Pence.
The Clinton campaign said the news was evidence of “more troubling connections between Donald Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine”.
The current RealClearPolitics average of national opinion polls puts Clinton 6.8 points ahead of Trump, at 47.8 percent to Trump’s 41 percent.
Trump leads by 9 points on destroying terrorist groups like ISIS, which is where he focused his concern on Monday.
Trump vowed to work “very closely” with NATO, sidestepping previous criticism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after saying that a Trump presidency would not automatically leap to members’ defense. “Our new approach, which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas, and by our friends in the Middle East, must be to halt the spread of radical Islam”.
Trump did not clarify how U.S. officials would assess the veracity of responses to the questionnaires or how much manpower it would require to complete such arduous vetting. Last month, in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes”, Trump was pressed on whether his call for a declaration of war against ISIS would mean committing American soldiers. “I am going to have very few troops on the ground”, he said.
Besides introducing the Muslim ban after the San Bernardino attack in December, Trump has so far not been forthcoming about his plan to take on ISIS and other terror groups, arguing that he doesn’t want to tip off his enemies. He hasn’t backed away from it, though, and has in interviews called his proposals an “expansion” of the ban. He said the policy would first require a temporary halt in immigration from risky regions of the world.
“Any country that shares this goal will be our allies”, Trump said. “Only those who we expect to flourish in our country – and to embrace a tolerant American society – should be issued visas”.
The Republican nominee’s foreign policy address comes during a rocky stretch for his campaign.
“As soon as I take office, I will ask the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to identify a list of regions where inadequate screening can not take place”.
Here’s what they are saying about Trump’s speech.
Trump said Monday that Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state proves “she lacks the judgment…stability, temperament and the moral character to lead our nation”.
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Adding to Trump’s woes this week was the news, first reported by The New York Times, that the name of his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was on secret ledgers showing cash payments designated to him of more than $12 million from a Ukrainian political party with close ties to Russian Federation.
