Donald Trump on Monday took credit again for forecasting the kind of mass terror attack that occurred in Orlando on Sunday.

In the hours after the early morning shooting at a gay nightclub that killed 50 people including the gunman, Trump was heavily criticized for saying on Twitter that he appreciated “the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

On Monday, he called himself “a pretty good prognosticator” in a phone interview with CNN.

Asked about what he would do to stop these kinds of attacks, Trump reiterated his demand that the U.S. stop accepting refugees from Syria.

“These Syrian refuges, many of them are going to cause a lot of problems,” he said. “We will have problems like you have never seen before. Hillary Clinton is going to be weaker than [President Barack] Obama.”

When confronted with the fact that the gunman in the Orlando attack was an American citizen, Trump did not retreat from his talking points about stopping foreign Muslims from entering the country, but added, “We have thousands of people in the United States, living in the United States with the same kind of hate as this guy and we have to know who they are.”

Confronted with that fact again later on ABC, Trump pivoted to his allegations that many Syrian refugees have ties to ISIS.

“We don’t know where they come from. They could be ISIS,” he said. “
In fact, some of them have cell phones with ISIS flags on them.”

To fight these kind of attacks Trump again called for surveillance of Muslim communities in his CNN interview.   

“For some reason the Muslim community does not report people like this,” he said.

Trump repeated similar claims he made after mass shootings in San Bernardino, California, and Paris that things could have been different in Orlando if people had been armed.

“If you had guns on the other side, you would not have the same number of deaths,” he said.

He then came back to the subject of Syrian refugees, saying we should “build a safe zone in Syria, make the Gulf states pay for it.”

Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, interviewed on CNN, said Trump’s repeated call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. was “ridiculous.”  

Contact Smith at 


jeremysmith@cqrollcall.com


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@JeremySilkSmith

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