Trump Predictably Uses Attacks to Justify Counter-Productive Anti-Muslim Policies

President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for a Muslim ban or registry are still on the table, he suggested Wednesday afternoon, implying that the deadly attacks this week in Turkey and Berlin validated such discriminatory policies.

Speaking to reporters outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida he said that “what’s going on is terrible. Terrible terrible.”

Trump was asked by a reporter: “Has it caused you to rethink or reevaluate your plans to create a Muslim registry or ban Muslim immigration in the United States?” He responded: “You’ve known my plans all along and I’ve been proven to be right. 100 percent correct.”

“[Reactions like Trump’s are] precisely what ISIS’s leadership wants: to generate anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe that can, in turn, be used to generate anti-Western sentiment in the Middle East and North Africa.” —Tania Ildefonso Ocampos, Middle East analyst

Trump had on Monday blamed both attacks on radical Islamic terrorism, which Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) criticized, saying that it was a premature conclusion and that “it appears that the attack in Turkey on the Russian ambassador wasn’t a religious attack but was a political one, revenge for what’s going on in Aleppo.”

In September on the campaign trail, Trump similarly followed the bombing in Manhattan by saying that “we’ve been letting people in by their thousands and thousands and I’ve been saying you’ve got to stop it.” He also said that the policing tactics of Israeli forces including profiling were a model to follow.

Last December, the Trump campaign said in a statement that he “is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” and has said that his White House “would certainly implement” a Muslim database.