“We have a President who wants to be so politically correct that he doesn’t want to use the term radical Islamic terrorism, doesn’t want to use it”, said Trump, who is known for his anti-Muslim rhetoric. Forty-four percent of Americans gave Obama high marks for his response, while 34 percent gave him an unfavorable rating.
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Obama walked listeners through a familiar litany of battlefield successes, but then came another message. The Washington Post wrote about it with the headline “Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting”.
In none of these comments did Trump clearly tie Obama to the Orlando shooting or terrorism in general, nor did he say outright that Obama has terrorist sympathies. The violence, the worst mass shooting in United States history, left 49 victims dead.
Obama is correct in saying “Calling a threat by a different name does not make it going away”.
“I’ll just have to do it by myself”, Trump said.
“I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. Would it bring in more allies, is there a military strategy that is served by this?” he said.
Obama spoke following a previously scheduled meeting of his National Security Council to discuss the progress in the war against the Islamic State. He says it will make the country less safe by fueling the notion among followers of the Islamic State group that the West hates Muslims.
Trump has used the carnage to renew his call to temporarily ban foreign Muslims from entering the country, and added a new element: a suspension of immigration from areas of the world with a proven history of terrorism against the US and its allies.
The poll said 62 percent of Democrats approve of presumed presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s response to the attack.
“First off you have to just pray for those victims and their families, because they go out for an evening out and they never think that 50 of them are not coming home”, he said.
“We have to go and we have to maybe check, respectfully, the mosques”.
Despite differences with the White House over the use of “radical Islam”, national GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Kim Alfano is a Republican strategist and CEO of Alfano Communications.
Republicans roundly rejected President Obama’s rationale for refusing to use the term “radical Islam” in describing terror attacks, responding that: “You have to define the enemy to defeat it”.
Overall, 57 percent said the Sunday attack would be best characterized as both a hate crime against gays and lesbians and an act of terrorism, while 14 percent said it was mostly a terrorist act and 25 percent said it was mostly a hate crime.
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“There is no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam, ‘” he said. That, together with the assertion that being selective about immigration is “not who we are”.
