WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump sauntered into SEC Primary territory tonight and told a Knoxville, Tenn., rally that if Friday's Paris terrorist attacks had happened in a Second Amendment-loving area, it would have been "a different story."
Trump led his swaggering stump speech with his take on the Paris attacks:
"If you had 25 people in there who would have been [armed], it would have been a totally different story, folks. There would have been the shootout at the OK Corral. And you would have had death, but it would have been their death."
The entire Republican field quickly recalibrated toward foreign policy after Friday's attack. In addition to the usual retinue of TV interviews, Trump has spent the intervening days in SEC Primary country, drumming up conservative support in the Southern states voting March 1. He started Saturday night in Texas and continued tonight in Tennessee.
Trump has weaved Paris into the message he's delivered for months. A pledge for military brawn now includes this salty line about how he would deal with ISIS: "I'm going to bomb the s--- out of them."
On Syrian refugees -- increasingly denounced in Georgia and elsewhere -- Trump incorporates the issue into his well-known seal-the-borders mantra. In so doing he inflated President Barack Obama's pledge to take in 10,000 refugees:
"I have a tremendous heart. I want to take care of people. But you look at this migration and I said to my wife the other day they seem like so many men, so strong. They're strong-looking guys -- not as strong as you [speaking to someone in the audience] but that's OK. They're strong-looking guys. And I say: Why aren't they back fighting for their country? That's No. 1. Is this a Trojan horse?"
The Trump plan instead involves seizing a large chunk of land from Syria, "which, believe me, you get for the right price." The displaced people go there, Trump said:
"Keep 'em in Syria. You build a tremendous safe zone. It will cost you tremendously much less, much less. And they'll be there, and the weather's the same. Everything's the same. ... When it's all over, they move back. And they move back into their cities."
The night of the attacks, conservative commentator Ann Coulter said on Twitter "Donald Trump was elected president tonight."
Trump mentioned that, too, and plugged Coulter's book.
About the Author
