Two days after a homemade bomb wounded 29 in lower Manhattan, the Republican presidential nominee decried Muslim refugees as a “cancer from within” and suggested that American law enforcement should racially profile Arab men, as they do in Israel (where many such men live under military occupation).
“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are. They’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling,” Donald Trump told Fox & Friends Monday morning. “You know, in Israel they profile. They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do.”
Trump went on to condemn President Obama for allowing Muslim refugees into the country, decrying the effort to resettle Syrians displaced by war as a “Trojan horse” whose true effect would be to fill America with ISIS agents.
“How they came into the country in the first place is beyond me,” Trump said of legal American residents whom he hopes to represent as president. “This is cancer from within. This is something that’s going to be so tough. They stay together. They’re plotting.”
Trump’s past proposals for overt discrimination against American Muslims and prospective Muslim immigrants — through racial profiling, “databases,” and immigration bans — were among the most widely condemned of his campaign. While Trump has refused to “soften” his image as thoroughly as some GOP operatives might like, he did back away from his “Muslim ban,” suggesting the United States discriminate on the basis of region, not religion, when it comes to immigration.
But last weekend’s string of apparent, small-scale terror attacks — from a stabbing spree in Minnesota to bombings in New York and New Jersey — has Trump making his policies and rhetoric fascistic again. On Monday, Trump predicted that unless we “get tough” on “these people,” there will be more and more terror attacks in the coming weeks.
“I think maybe we’re going to be seeing a big change over the last couple days,” Trump said at the outset of the interview. “I think this is something that maybe will get, will happen, perhaps more and more, all over the country.”
The GOP nominee never misses an opportunity to set himself up for future “congrats.”
Nor to congratulate himself, when such credit is due. On Saturday night, hours before the local authorities had declared that the source of the Chelsea explosion had been a bomb — and days before police indicated an apparent connection with terrorism — Trump told a crowd in Colorado that a bomb had gone off in New York and that America needed to “get tough.” He was widely criticized for the remark.
“I heard — I didn’t see it — but I heard I was criticized for calling it correctly,” Trump told the Fox News morning crew. “But what I said was exactly correct. I should be a newscaster because I called it before the news.”
Here, the GOP nominee has a point. He should be a newscaster: Better for the Trump News Network’s eponymous host to debate Alex Jones about whether the car backfire they just heard was radical Islamic terrorism — or just Hillary’s latest false-flag operation — than for President Trump to hear it and order his mosque patrol to start “getting tough.”
