Donald Trump is hitting back at Hillary Clinton over her criticism of his “inflammatory” comments about Mexicans and immigration.
Trump said Clinton’s characterization of his comments was unfair and that his issue with United States’ border security goes way beyond Mexicans.
“What’s a country? How do you define a country if you don’t have borders?” Trump said during an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” “This has nothing to do with the Mexicans coming in. This has to do with the world coming in. You’re going to have Middle East coming in, you’re going to have everyone coming in because it’s literally a sieve,” he added.
The U.S. “had better get smart or we’re not going to have a country,” the billionaire business mogul said in response to Clinton’s interview with a Nevada radio station last week.
Trump said he’s honored by Clinton mentioning his rhetoric, if not his name, during her interview.
Clinton said during the interview that “a recent entry into the Republican presidential campaign said some very inflammatory things about Mexicans. Everybody should stand up and say that’s not acceptable. You don’t talk like that on talk radio. You don’t talk like that on the kind of political campaigns.”
Trump, in a vigorous response, said on Monday: “Now if that is incendiary — if that’s being tough or being unfair, you let me know. But I think having borders and having strong borders — and I mean strong borders — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” he added.
Some, Trump said, thought that was a “racist statement,” but he said it’s not.
“So we’re getting a lot of bad people coming in. … We take ’em to all parts of the country. I don’t feel — I know, if we’re going to have a country, we need a border, and we have to have a strong border so illegals aren’t coming in,” he said. “And that’s illegals from all over the world.”
On guns and the recent shooting in Charleston, Trump called himself a “huge Second Amendment person” and noted that gun-control laws in New York and Chicago have not stopped either major city from “rampant” violence.
”So you know, it’s like you can’t legislate against this,” he concluded.
Trump also praised the “beautiful” response by the Charleston community in the wake of last Wednesday’s shooting at the historic black Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina.
“I thought it was — maybe it was a lesson, almost, because you see so many problems in so many different locations, Hugh, and you see this beautiful aftermath to a horrible tragedy. And I watched it, and I thought it was really incredible, actually,” he said.
Trump said that while he has never supported President Barack Obama, he had hoped that the president would be the nation’s “cheerleader,” but that has not been the case.
“And certainly you would have thought he would have been much better for African-Americans, who are really suffering more than anybody else right now in terms of jobs and everything else,” he went on to say. “So you have an African-American president, and African-American youth is doing worse than virtually it’s ever done.”
