He reminded us of this in an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor yesterday evening, where he and O’Reilly spent a good chunk of their time together discussing the upcoming debate—Trump says he doesn’t plan on bringing up Bill Clinton’s infidelities, lucky us—although O’Reilly unsurprisingly did not ask what role his former boss Roger Ailes is playing in Trump’s preparation. But the most interesting part of their conversation was when they discussed the terror attacks that occurred last weekend in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota.
Trump has been touting “extreme vetting” as the solution to terrorism for months now, but even if it amounted to an actual policy, which it doesn’t, “extreme vetting” would not have stopped any of the recent terror attacks on American soil. He claims, like Richard Nixon with Vietnam, to have a “secret plan” to defeat ISIS. Nixon lied. Trump is clearly lying about his secret plan. Furthermore, he’s lying about what “profiling” means, telling O’Reilly that he never suggested that the U.S. profile Muslims in the first place.
His comments to O’Reilly are largely in keeping with his other terrorism “policies.” Trump is making his one core argument about terrorism, which is that Muslims have run amok and that the only way to stop them is to institute policies that harass them simply because they are Muslims. That none of them do a thing to stop terrorism is almost beside the point.