Donald Trump: It’s Time For a “Total and Complete Shutdown” of Muslims Entering The U.S

HotAir.com:

He’s not just talking about immigrants and refugees, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski emphasized. He’s talking about tourism too. No more Muslims until we “figure out what is going on,” whatever that means.

It’s a perfect Trumpian play, though. It’s highly politically incorrect; the media will go positively batsh*t over it; the rest of the GOP field, especially his new rival Ted Cruz, will squirm about how to respond; and the more heat Trump takes from all sides, the more his fans will love him for it. This is why so many Trump critics, me included, thought that Trump was agreeing with that reporter a few weeks ago when the reporter started asking him about a database of Muslim citizens. That proposal would accomplish most of the same things politically for him that this one does. Maybe he’s saving it for when Cruz crosses 35 percent in Iowa.

Cruz, by the way, also wants to restrict Muslim immigration — but only a particular type, namely refugees, and only from Muslim countries like Iraq and Syria that contain “territory substantially controlled by a foreign terrorist organization.” Tourists and immigrants would presumably still be welcome. Trump’s strategy here, I take it, is to show blue-collar Republicans that Cruz is, to borrow the phrase of the day, a “total pussy” for not being as hard-ass against Muslims as he is. What it’s going to end up doing in practice is making a lot of center-right Republicans more comfortable with the idea of nominating Cruz as a less demagogic alternative to Trump if it turns out that Cruz is the only guy in the race who can realistically stop him. In fact, a Twitter buddy tweeted at me after Trump put this statement out that Trump is a stalking horse for Cruz, a guy whose role in the race is really just to advance Cruz’s political interests. I don’t buy that — they’re too different ideologically — but I’m less skeptical of the idea than I used to be. Give Trump another month of high polling and you’ll have Jeb Bush donors quietly sending money to Cruz Super PACs to take him down.

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