“The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today”, Trump said on Monday afternoon in a national security-focused speech at Youngstown State University in Ohio.
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The candidate also used the speech to renew his call for a ban on immigrants from countries with a “history of exporting terrorism”, saying it is impossible to properly vet people coming from those places.
“Importantly, she also lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS and all of the many adversaries we face”, said Trump.
Now Trump would be on the lookout for people harboring “hostile attitudes toward our country or its principles or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law”, he said, as well as “screening out all members or the sympathizers of terrorist groups”.
Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, a senior policy adviser to Trump, described Trump’s strategy as “foreign policy realism”, while Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said Trump should take a U.S. naturalisation test himself as he prepares to propose new political hurdles for immigrants coming to the country. Nor did the campaign say whether additional screenings would apply to the millions of tourists who spend billions of dollars visiting the United States each year.
Mr. Trump’s scripted speech on combating radical Islamism sought to define his candidacy in terms of the biggest American concern – terrorism – and called for a global coalition based on that single issue.
We don’t need more of these problems like we’ve never had before.
Hillary Clinton’s Senior Policy Adviser, Jake Sullivan, released a statement, criticizing Trump’s call for submitting immigrants to ideological tests.
And then there are diversity visas, often referred to as the “green card lottery”, which each year admit a limited number of people from countries “with historically low rates of immigration” to the US.
In another break with goals of the Obama administration, Trump vowed to maintain the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and devote more effort to capturing, rather than killing, terrorist leaders, in hopes of gathering more intelligence.
“Those who do not believe in our constitution or who support bigotry and hatred will not be admitted for immigration into our country”.
Obama has held up Bush’s years-long commitment to setting up and securing a new government in Iraq after the initial invasion as a reason to avoid US military intervention in countries like Syria.
Trump previously proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. and to build a wall on the U.S. -Mexico border to prevent illegal immigration.
For a week, Trump has been laying the groundwork for contrasting his own approach to countering the Islamic State group with Democrats, calling US President Barack Obama the group’s “founder” and Clinton the “cofounder”. But we must use ideological warfare as well, ‘ he said.
– Donald Trump added a new wrinkle to his foreign policy platform. “I just said it so many times, virtually every time I was interviewed: Keep the oil, keep the oil”.
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Trump said he would screen out those who sympathize with terrorists as well as people who have a “hostile attitude” toward the US or who believe Islamic law should supplant USA law.
