Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton used the backdrop of the Brussels terror attack to drive home their respective political messages after securing new victories on Tuesday in presidential nomination contests.
Mr. Trump reiterated his call for a ban on Muslims travelling to the U.S, and waterboarding of terror suspects to extract information from them, while Ms. Clinton said in her victory speech that “the last thing we need are leaders who incite more fear”.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton won Arizona, the State that had the highest number of delegates on Tuesday. Senator Ted Cruz defeated Mr. Trump in Utah, and on the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders won Utah and Idaho and promised to take the contest all the way to the convention.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton maintain their leads in delegate counts in respective parties after Tuesday.
Occasional terror strikes through the campaign season have helped Mr. Trump’s tactics. Mr. Trump has effectively used the Paris and California terror strikes to bolster his campaign and Brussels happened just as his rhetoric may have plateaued. “Waterboarding would be fine. If they can expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding,” Mr. Trump said.
Meanwhile, in a TV interview, Mr. Trump said Muslim communities are “absolutely not reporting” suspected terrorists and need to “open up to society”.
“When they see trouble they have to report it. They are not reporting it. They are absolutely not reporting it and that is a big problem,” he said.
Reconciliation with Cruz
Meanwhile, Mr. Cruz won the endorsement of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who dropped out of the race last month. Mr. Bush’s endorsement comes close after Senator Lindsey Graham’s support for Mr. Cruz and indicates traditional Republican elite’s reconciliation with his rise, though they may not be excited about it.
“For the sake of our party and country, we must move to overcome the divisiveness and vulgarity Donald Trump has brought into the political arena, or we will certainly lose our chance to defeat the Democratic nominee and reverse President Obama’s failed policies,” Mr. Bush said in the statement.
Differentiating between Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump may be more a question of semantics than substance. Mr. Cruz called for higher border security to stop “terrorist infiltration”, and increased surveillance of Muslim neighbourhoods in U.S. “Radical Islam is at war with us. For over seven years we have had a President who refuses to acknowledge this reality. And the truth is, we can never hope to defeat this evil so long as we refuse to even name it. That ends on January 20, 2017, when I am sworn in as President. We will name our enemy — radical Islamic terrorism. And we will defeat it,” Mr. Cruz said. “In the face of terror, America doesn’t panic,” Ms. Clinton said. “What Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and others are suggesting is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. It will not keep us safe, this is a time for America to lead, not cower.”
