Donald Trump wasn’t even on the stage yet and he was already the focus of Republicans in Tuesday’s undercard presidential debate, with his fellow contenders rejecting his plans to halt Muslim visitors.
Sen. Lindsey Graham went so far as to apologize to the world for Mr. Trump’s comments, saying he’s giving fuel to the Islamic State terrorist movement.
“Donald Trump has done the one single thing you cannot do — declare war on Islam itself,” the South Carolina senator said — though he did say he would support Mr. Trump if he is the eventual GOP nominee.
Mr. Trump’s call for a temporary halt to Muslim visitors is popular among GOP voters, with several polls showing some 65 percent of likely primary voters backing the time-out. That’s left the billionaire businessman’s competitors in a tough position, trying to bring tough talk to voters not necessarily interested in hearing it.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki said Mr. Trump was targeting a religion, and said that made him unfit to be president.
The exchanges came at the beginning of the undercard debate featuring lower-tier GOP presidential hopefuls Tuesday evening. CNN carried the debate from Las Vegas.
Mr. Trump was going to get his own say later in the night Tuesday when the top-tier candidates took to the stage.
But he had one semi-defender in former Sen. Rick Santorum, who said while he didn’t think Mr. Trump’s proposal was the right one, the heart behind the sentiment is clear.
“What Donald Trump was saying was nothing against Muslims. His comment was against this admin that doesn’t have a policy to properly vet people coming into this country,” Mr. Santorum said.
The four candidates in the undercard debate — former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee joined Mr. Santorum, Mr. Graham and Mr. Pataki — all called for the U.S. to step up its surveillance of Muslim mosques.
“If Islam is as wonderful and peaceful as its adherents say, shouldn’t they all be begging us to come and listen to these sermons?” said Mr. Huckabee, who was a Baptist preacher before his life in politics and said anyone would have been welcome to come into his church to hear services.
Several of the candidates said they would lead the push for a law to give investigators a back-door way to peek at encrypted messages, and would demand tech companies enlist in the battle to weed radical ideology from online.
“The last thing you’re going to hear if I become president is ’You have the right to remain silent,’” Mr. Graham said.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ likely nominee in next year’s elections, delivered her own plans for combating the threat of an attack in the U.S. in a speech Tuesday where she also piled on Mr. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who said the answer to defeating the Islamic State was a stiffer bombing campaign.
“Promising to carpet bomb until the desert glows doesn’t make you sound strong, it makes you sound like you’re in over your head,” she said in a speech at the University of Minnesota.
She said Americans cannot give in to fear, and said Republican rhetoric about Muslims makes it tougher to organize the kind of anti-Islamic State coalition all sides agree is needed to win and maintain territory from the terrorists.
“Demonizing Muslims also feeds a narrative that jihadists use to recruit new followers around the world, that the United States is at war with Islam,” she said. “This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between civilization and barbarism and that’s how it must be seen and fought.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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