The daylong furor capped a week of one-upmanship among Republican presidential candidates as to who could sound toughest about preventing terrorism after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris. Polls show the national mood has soured on accepting refugees from Syria amid concerns about potential terrorist attacks within the United States.
Mr. Trump’s talk of a national database of Muslims, first in an interview published on Thursday by Yahoo News and later in an exchange with an NBC News reporter, seemed the culmination of months of heated debate about illegal immigration as an urgent danger to Americans’ personal safety.
It came as Mr. Trump has regained some momentum in the Republican presidential race, with polls showing his support on the rise nationally since the Paris attacks, and Ben Carson’s on the decline.
By Friday, though, he appeared to pull back slightly from the idea. In a post on Twitter, Mr. Trump complained that it was a reporter, not he, who had first raised the idea of a database. And his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, insisted that Mr. Trump had been asked leading questions by the NBC reporter under “blaring music” and that he had in mind a terrorist watch list, not a registry of Muslims.
Still, nowhere, even on Friday, did Mr. Trump, who has rarely acknowledged being at fault in a campaign predicated on his strength as a leader, clearly state that he was opposed to the idea of a registry of Muslims.
For months, Mr. Trump has set the tone and pace of the Republican primary, forcing his rivals to respond to his statements and in some cases to try to emulate his style and positions. His periodic eruptions have seemed to power his campaign; he has denigrated Senator John McCain’s record in Vietnam because he was a prisoner of war, saying that the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was bleeding from “wherever,” insulted Carly Fiorina’s looks and read Senator Lindsey Graham’s cellphone number aloud before a crowd of thousands. Through it all, his supporters have held firm.
Yet rivals who have been pulled sharply to the right by Mr. Trump on issues like immigration broke with him this time — a rare public distancing by politicians who have seemed handcuffed out of fear that swinging back at Mr. Trump would make them the butt of his next joke or offending his supporters.
In the Yahoo interview on Thursday, which came on the heels of his calls to close some mosques and carefully monitor others, Mr. Trump suggested, with few specifics, that he would impose new measures to deal with terrorism.
“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” he said. “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
Asked by the Yahoo reporter about the possibility of a database for Muslims or “a form of special identification that noted their religion,” Mr. Trump did not reject either idea. Later that day, as Mr. Trump left a campaign event in Iowa, an NBC reporter followed up. Asked if he would set up a database to track Muslims, Mr. Trump replied, “I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.”
Asked about the effect that would have, however, he replied, “It would stop people from coming in illegally” — perhaps suggesting that Mr. Trump, who has vowed to build a “beautiful” wall along the Mexican border, was not focused on the question.
And when the NBC reporter approached Mr. Trump a second time and asked about the difference between registering Muslims and what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany, Mr. Trump grew impatient: “You tell me,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s remarks took hours to circulate widely over social media. But his seemingly serious consideration for the idea of treating an entire religious group with suspicion created the risk of a new set of problems for a party already struggling to appeal beyond its largely white political base. The party has also spent years objecting to what Republicans call government overreach by President Obama.
By Friday morning, many Democrats, some Republicans and a cross-section of religious leaders were denouncing Mr. Trump’s remarks.
Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, responded on CNBC by saying, “You talk about closing mosques, you talk about registering people — that’s just wrong.”
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is campaigning on a platform in which “religious freedom” plays a major part but is also seeking to inherit Mr. Trump’s supporters if and when his campaign falters, hit on a gentler way of dissociating himself from the idea. “I’m a big fan of Donald Trump’s, but I’m not a fan of government registries,” he said in Sioux City, Iowa.
But Mr. Cruz also accused the news media of trying to divide the Republican Party, in effect siding with Mr. Trump against a common enemy.
“I recognize that the media would love to get me and other candidates to attack Donald Trump,” Mr. Cruz said. “There may be other candidates who want to do that. I ain’t gonna do it.”
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has gained some traction by virtually camping out in New Hampshire, belittled Mr. Trump without naming him. “The indiscriminate closing of mosques or the establishment of a national registry based on religion will do nothing to keep us safer and shows a lack of understanding on how to effectively prevent terrorist attacks,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Trump’s remarks drew condemnation not only from American Muslims but also from Christian, Jewish and interfaith leaders.
“We had expected a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric during the election cycle, but we never thought it would hark back to the rhetoric of the 1930s,” said Ibrahim Hooper, the communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Russell D. Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “I do think it’s scary when we have candidates talking about shutting down houses of worship, about having badges for religious groups. That ought to alarm every American.”
Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary under President George W. Bush and a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, criticized Mr. Trump’s remarks as intolerable. But he also said that, while some have believed that Mr. Trump’s supporters would gravitate toward more serious-minded candidates after the Paris attacks, he anticipated the opposite.
“People rally to strength,” Mr. Fleischer said.
Source...MSN
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