This is not the first time Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, is making a controversial comment.
The celebrity politician entered the Republican primary race by suggesting that the Mexicans coming illegally to the U.S. were rapists. He then said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured in Vietnam. He mocked a journalist for being disabled and once implied that he received hostile questioning during a Republican presidential debate because the television moderator was menstruating.
But Mr. Trump’s call on Monday for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” was his most extreme pledge yet. The statement was issued to the media a day after he mocked President Barack Obama’s speech from the Oval office on fighting the Islamic terror, and called for profiling Muslims.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I think there can be profiling,” Mr. Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” programme on Sunday. “A lot of people are dead right now. So everybody wants to be politically correct, and that’s part of the problem that we have with our country… You have people that have to be tracked. If they’re Muslims, they’re Muslims.”
While Republican Party leaders generally take tough postures against radical Islamism and are supportive of wars abroad, nobody in the election fray has gone this far to suggest that Muslims be profiled or be banned from entering the country. Other Republican candidates as well as the neoconservative intellectuals within the GOP have reacted sharply to Mr. Trump’s comment.
ADVERTISEMENT
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has termed Mr. Trump’s comment a “ridiculous position”, while ex-Florida Governor Jeb Bush called it “unhinged”. In a radio interview, former Vice-President Dick Cheney said “religious freedom’s been a very important part of our, our history.”
“Well, I think this whole notion that somehow we need to say no more Muslims and just ban a whole religion goes against everything we stand for and believe in,” he said.
Though it might appear to be an awkward position for a mainstream political party, there’s a method in Mr. Trump’s extreme comments. He’s trying to consolidate his position among the right-wing Republican vote base through his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions.
It’s worth recalling that the controversial statements he made did nothing to challenge his poll position.
Ahead of his rivalsMr. Trump is now more than 20 points ahead of his nearest Republican rival, Ben Carson, according to a poll released by CNN on Friday. Latest polls show that Mr. Trump’s popularity among the Republican voters rose after last month’s Paris terror attack in which 130 people were killed. “Every time things get worse, I do better,” Mr. Trump said. “People want strength.”
His latest remarks come close on the heels of the San Bernadino attack where a couple, apparently inspired by the Islamic State terror group, killed 14 people.
Even after his remarks triggered sharp responses from his own party, Mr. Trump appeared to be defiant. While addressing a crowd of cheering supporters on Monday night in South Carolina, he said: “I wrote something today that was very salient, very important… It was probably not politically correct… But. I. Don’t. Care.”
Eric Fehrnstrom, a Republican strategist who advised Mitt Romney in 2012, brushes off negative political impact of Mr. Trump’s extreme positions on his political chances. “As much as anyone may disagree with his policies [and I do], Trump is not hurting himself with GOP voters with his negativity toward Muslims,” he tweeted on Monday.