Obama condemns Trump’s response to Orlando attack

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has denounced Donald Trump for his remarks in the aftermath of the shooting massacre in Orlando, Florida, warning that Mr Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was peddling a “dangerous” mindset that recalled the darkest and most shameful periods in United States history.

“We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests entire religious communities are complicit in violence,” said Mr Obama at the Treasury Department, without mentioning Mr Trump by name.

His statement, an extraordinary condemnation by a sitting president of a man who is to be the opposing party’s nominee for the White House, came after Mr Obama met with his national security team on the status of the US effort against the Islamic State, a meeting that the President said had been dominated by discussion of the Orlando rampage.

“Where does this stop?” said Mr Obama about Mr Trump’s approach, noting that Mr Trump had proposed a ban on admitting Muslims into the US, and that the Orlando assailant, like perpetrators of previous domestic terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, and Fort Hood, Texas, was a US citizen.

“Are we going to start treating all Muslim-Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith?” Mr Obama asked, his voice rising with frustration. “Do Republican officials actually agree with this? Because that’s not the America we want — it doesn’t reflect our democratic ideals. It won’t make us more safe. It will make us less safe.”

Appearing in Pittsburgh as Mr Obama spoke, Mrs Hillary Clinton gave a blistering denunciation of her own. She echoed many of the President’s points and even some of his language, assailing Mr Trump’s temperament, ridiculing his proposals and arguing that he had failed to meet the gravity of the moment.

“History will remember what we do in this moment,” she told hundreds of supporters inside a union hall, asking “responsible Republican leaders” to join her in condemning Mr Trump. “What Donald Trump is saying is shameful.”

Her half-hour speech was a point-by-point rebuttal to Mr Trump’s remarks a day earlier, when he issued a searing broadside implying that all Muslim immigrants posed a potential threat to US security. The nearly simultaneous condemnations of Mr Trump from the President and the presumptive Democratic nominee to succeed him had the feel of a coordinated assault, although the White House insisted there had been no preplanning.

Mr Trump, unbowed by the criticism, said Mr Obama was coddling terrorists. “President Obama claims to know our enemy, and yet he continues to prioritise our enemy over our allies and, for that matter, the American people,” he said in a statement. “When I am president, it will always be America first.”

Members of Mr Trump’s party were themselves critical of the candidate’s language and proposals. Speaker Paul Ryan, the nation’s highest-ranking elected Republican, said at a news conference that Mr Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants was not in the country’s interest, nor did it reflect the principles of his party.

“There’s a really important distinction that every American needs to keep in mind: This is a war with radical Islam. It’s not a war with Islam,” said Mr Ryan. “The vast, vast majority of Muslims in this country and around the world are moderate, they’re peaceful, they’re tolerant, and so they’re among our best allies, among our best resources in this fight against radical Islamic terrorism.”

Republican Senator Jeff Flake has been among the most outspoken in his party about withholding his endorsement of Mr Trump. Mr Flake said in a Twitter post that he was “appreciative” that Mr Ryan had spoken out.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, refused to talk about his party’s presidential nominee, an indication of the precarious position in which Mr Trump has placed Republican elected officials.

Mr Obama rejected criticism from Mr Trump and other Republicans about his refusal to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the Islamic State. The President said he would not use the wording because he was unwilling to give the Islamic State the victory of acceptance of its vision that it is the leader of a holy war between Islam and the West.

“If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them,” said Mr Obama.

During a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, hours after Mr Obama’s remarks, Mr Trump offered a brief response. “I watched President Obama today, and he was more angry at me than he was at the shooter,” said Mr Trump. “The level of anger, that’s the kind of anger he should have for the shooter and these killers that shouldn’t be here.”

Mr Obama is scheduled to travel to Orlando today to visit the surviving victims and the families of those killed in the rampage Sunday morning. He was to have travelled to Wisconsin yesterday for his first campaign appearance with Mrs Clinton since endorsing her last week, but the event was cancelled in light of the shooting.

Still, Tuesday’s one-two punch left little doubt that Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton plan to savage Mr Trump on the campaign trail. The President was careful not to cast his criticism in political terms and never mentioned Mr Trump’s name even as he clearly targeted him — at one point referring derisively to “politicians who tweet” — and his policy proposals. Instead, Mr Obama spoke ominously of the stakes for the nation’s security, and its very identity, if the ideas espoused by Mr Trump and many in the Republican Party are widely accepted.

“We’ve gone through moments in our history before where we acted out of fear, and we came to regret it,” said Mr Obama. “We’ve seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens, and it as been a shameful part of our history.”

Mrs Clinton, in a striking departure from her speech Monday, when she refrained from saying Mr Trump’s name and said it was “not a day for politics”, took direct aim Tuesday at his penchant for conspiracy theory. She reminded the crowd that he was “a leader of the birther movement” questioning Mr Obama’s birthplace.

After the Orlando attack, she noted, Mr Trump suggested on television that Mr Obama sympathised with Islamic terrorists. “Just think about that for a second,” said Mrs Clinton. “Even in a time of divided politics, this is way beyond anything that should be said by someone running for president of the United States.”

Mr Obama staunchly defended his administration’s approach to countering terrorism, listing gains that the US has made against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and Libya: Killing the group’s top leaders, capturing more of its territory and whittling away at its financial resources.

He also called on Congress to enact gun restrictions that it has so far resisted, including the resurrection of a ban on assault weapons and a measure that would bar people on “no-fly” lists because of suspected terrorist ties from buying a gun.