Trump and Clinton trade attacks on fighting terrorism after Orlando massacre

Donald Trump said Monday that the massacre in Orlando, Florida, justified his call for a ban on Muslim immigration and warned that if Hillary Clinton were elected president, thousands of potential Islamic terrorists would flood into the country with the intention of slaughtering innocent Americans.

Clinton, meanwhile, warned that Trump's anti-Muslim stances were damaging efforts to defeat terrorism and vowed to step up airstrikes against the Islamic State while working with the private sector to root out lone wolf terrorists who are often recruited or inspired online.

The two candidates issued their critiques of each other a day after a U.S. citizen born to Afghan immigrants, declaring his allegiance to the Islamic State, killed 49 people and wounded 53 at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Trump vowed to give the authorities more tools to clamp down on terrorists and that, if elected, he would use his executive powers to keep foreign Muslims from entering the country for an indefinite period of time.

"They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety and above all else," Trump said Monday afternoon at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire. "I refuse to be politically correct."

Indeed, Trump appeared to broaden his call for a ban on Muslim immigration, extending it to whole regions rather than applying it strictly according to religion. He said he would "suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we understand how to end these threats."

And Trump said that he wanted to work with U.S. Muslims to fight terrorism, but continued to insinuate that they were looking the other way as terror plots unfold and called on them to reveal what they know.

"Muslim communities must cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad — and they do know where they are," Trump said.

Although his proposals were not new, his forceful call for such provocative ideas demonstrated that he does not intend to temper his tone for a general election audience.

Trump accused Clinton of wanting to allow into the country "radical Muslims" who enslave women and slaughter gay people. He said that despite Clinton's claims to be friendlier to the LGBT community, he was the one making their safety a priority.

He also decried Clinton's call for restrictions on guns, arguing that her policies would render the vulnerable defenseless.

"She wants to take away Americans' guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us," Trump said. "Let them come in, let them have all the fun they want."

Trump had planned to deliver a detailed critique of Clinton's character Monday, then shifted gears after the Sunday attack. But he did not hold back from assailing Clinton, deriding her performance as secretary of state and casting her as inept.

Promising to be the country's protector-in-chief as president, Trump insisted that the direction of the country would be different under his leadership.

"If I get in there, it is going to change, and it is going to change quickly," Trump said. "We are going from totally incompetent to just the opposite, believe me."

Trump's speech came shortly after Clinton, in Cleveland, called for vigilance in the fight against homegrown terrorists inspired by the Islamic State and said the response to the Orlando massacre required "clear eyes, steady hands, and unwary determination and pride in our country and our values."

"The murder of innocent people breaks our hearts, tears at our sense of security and makes us furious," she said. "Now we have to steel our resolve to respond."

Clinton called for bolstering coalition airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria and said she would work with the public and private sectors to identify and root out terrorist "lone wolves" in the United States and Europe who become radicalized without traveling overseas, often through online recruitment.

"Orlando makes it even more clear," she said. "We cannot contain this threat. We must defeat it."

She also faulted some U.S. allies, saying it was "long past time" for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Muslim countries "to stop their citizens from funding extremist organizations," and to "stop supporting radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path to extremism."

Though it was the worst attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, the Orlando massacre fell into no single category. Clinton called for a ban on assault weapons like the AR-15 used in Orlando and at the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. And she expressed her support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

"The terrorist in Orlando targeted LGBT Americans out of hatred and bigotry, and an attack on any American is an attack on all Americans," she said, before directly appealing to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender voters: "You have millions of allies who will always have your back," she said. "And I am one of them."

Clinton, who had already canceled a planned fundraiser in Cincinnati and postponed her first joint campaign appearance with President Barack Obama, told her audience that it was "not a day for politics," but then, without uttering his name, leveled a stern rebuke at Trump.

She invoked the bipartisanship that characterized the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when she was a senator from New York. "America is strongest when we all believe we have a stake in our country and our future," she said.

Before the Orlando shooting, Clinton had planned to deliver a major address previewing her campaign's general election theme, built around the slogan "Stronger Together." After learning of the massacre at her home in Chappaqua, New York, Sunday, Clinton huddled with advisers, called Orlando's mayor, Buddy Dyer, and overhauled her remarks. But the theme was still threaded into her critique of Trump.

"We are not a land of winners and losers," she said. "This has always been a country of 'we,' not 'me.' We stand together because we are stronger together — e pluribus unum, out of many one."

Alluding to Trump's call for monitoring U.S.-born Muslims and mosques and to his proposal to ban Muslims temporarily from entering the United States, Clinton said such actions would harm "the vast majority of Muslims who love freedom and hate terror."

She suggested Trump's approach "plays right into the terrorists' hands," and alienates Muslim sympathizers in the process, pointing out that "hate crimes against Muslims and mosques have tripled."