Does Donald Trump Still Want to Ban Muslims?
The Associated Press has a report today on Donald Trump’s “evolving” Muslim ban. The proposal was always short on details—“Because I am so politically correct, I would never be the one to say. You figure it out!” he wrote to the AP in an email—but every attempt to clarify has only confused the issue further.
Following the San Bernardino shootings in December, Trump released the following statement: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
That proposal has gone through several iterations in the months since. This weekend, Trump told reporters that he’d have no problem with Muslims coming to the United States from Scotland.
“I would limit specific terrorist countries, and we know who those terrorist countries are,” Trump told Bloomberg News on Saturday. “I want terrorists out. I want people that have bad thoughts out.” (Hm.)
It’s not obvious whether these policy proposals are meant to complement or replace each other. From the AP:
Asked to clarify whether Trump still supports a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. as originally proposed, a ban of immigration from states associated with terrorism, as he said in his post-Orlando speech, or strong vetting of people coming into the country from such nations, as he said this past weekend in Scotland, Hicks said: “Mr. Trump stated a position consistent with his speech two weeks ago.”
“He has been very clear,” she added in an email Monday. It’s the press, she said, that has “tried to cause confusion.”
In any event, Frank Gaffney, the anti-Muslim activist behind Trump’s original proposal, does not seem to have changed his position. “I think Donald Trump is—you know, with all of his faults, and there are some—he’s got this right,” Gaffney told Breitbart News Daily earlier this month. “We don’t need to import more jihadists. The American people understand that. We need to stop the ones that are here as well—even, and most especially, really, those that are doing business as the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, Gaffney claimed, is “stealthily, covertly subverting us from within” and “creating the infrastructure that jihadists are using around the world, to do the violent jihad as well.”
Well, that clears things up.