Donald Trump called Monday for “extreme” ideological vetting of immigrants seeking admission to the United States, vowing to significantly overhaul the country’s screening process and block those who sympathize with extremist groups or don’t embrace American values.
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In his second big policy speech in as many weeks, Trump said he would wage a multi-front “military, cyber and financial” war to defeat Islamic State.
The senior campaign official who previewed Trump’s speech did not address Trump’s initial description of the ban, but described the current proposal as one of withholding visas for individuals from any country “where we can not perform adequate screenings” and where there is heavy terrorist activity.
Donald Trump on Monday will lay out his strategy for defeating radical Islamic terrorism, painting the fight as an ideological struggle on par with that of the Cold War.
The campaign shakeup, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes as polls show Trump trailing Clinton nationally and in key battleground states following a hard campaign stretch that saw him insulting the Muslim parents of a U.S. Army soldier who died in Iraq and temporarily refraining from endorsing House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary race.
In a major national security speech Monday in Ohio, Donald Trump vowed to fight ISIS viciously and start here at home where he said the danger is not just newcomers to the United States, but American citizens whose parents are from nations where radical Islam thrives.
As president, he said, he would ask the U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security to identify regions of the world that remain hostile to the United States and where screening might not be sufficient to catch those who pose a threat.
He claimed that many recent terror attacks in the United States have been carried out by immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Throughout his scripted policy address, Trump showed a more serious side than he did last week, when he erroneously described Obama as the “founder” of ISIS – a comment he later explained as sarcasm.
Trump’s speech coincided with sagging poll numbers in key swing states, as the Republican nominee has lurched from one controversy to the next.
While Trump is not expected to lay out on Monday which countries’ citizens would be banned from the U.S., the senior campaign official offered Syria and Libya as examples of two countries that would be affected by the ban.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s campaign isn’t skipping a beat when it comes to Trump’s connections to Russian Federation. He focused on the withdrawal of USA troops from Iraq in 2011 and the military intervention in Libya, which Clinton advocated when she was secretary of state.
Trump would require everyone entering America to believe in religious freedom, gender quality, and gay rights which would be verified with questionnaires, social media, and interviews with friends. Trump did not clarify how US officials would assess the veracity of responses to the questionnaires or how much manpower it would require to complete such arduous vetting. The time is long overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.
Trump’s campaign announced earlier that it would finally begin airing its first ads of the general election next week in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
That proposal raised numerous questions that the campaign never clarified, including whether it would apply to citizens of countries such as France, Israel, or Ireland, which have suffered recent and past attacks.
“They, too, have much at stake in the outcome in Syria, and have had their own battles with Islamic terrorism”, Trump said. Trump had promised to release his list of “terror countries” soon.
The New York Times reports Ukrainian leaders have given Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, millions in cash while Manafort was a political consultant there.
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The campaign stepped up criticism Monday by suggesting that Manafort pushed for pro-Russia changes to the Republican Party platform and by suggesting that several Trump advisers have links to Moscow.
