Reuters, Washington :Democratic President Barack Obama lambasted Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants on Tuesday in an angry denunciation of the Republican presidential candidate’s response to the Orlando nightclub massacre.Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Democrat he has endorsed to succeed him in the Nov. 8 general election, made nearly simultaneous speeches responding to Trump, the New York mogul who is soon to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.Clearly annoyed, Obama used a speech at the Treasury Department to respond to Trump’s proposed suspension of immigration from countries with a “history of terrorism” in response to the killing of 49 people early on Sunday in Orlando, Florida. The gunman was U.S.-born Omar Mateen, 29, whose parents immigrated from Afghanistan.The president, without mentioning Trump by name, dismissed the Republican’s criticism of Obama for not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe Islamic State militants. Obama called the phrase a political distraction.”What exactly would using this label accomplish, what exactly would it change?” Obama said. “Someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting? … There’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ It’s a political talking point.”Obama, who canceled a joint appearance with Clinton planned on Wednesday in Wisconsin due to the events in Orlando, appeared to be enjoying his role in the campaign to select his successor. He tangled with Trump in 2011, producing his birth certificate to refute Trump’s claim that the president was not born in the United States.”We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States to bar all Muslims from immigrating to America. We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests entire religious communities are complicit in violence,” Obama said. “Where does this stop?”Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state, addressed supporters in Pittsburgh. The candidate said Trump’s proposal bolstered her case that he was temperamentally unfit to serve as president, saying the commander in chief “is a job that demands a calm, collected and dignified response” to events like the Orlando massacre.Clinton noted that Trump seemed to suggest on Monday in a television interview that Obama might have somehow been responsible for the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a point that Trump said he did not make.”I have to ask: Will responsible Republican leaders stand up to their presumptive nominee or will they stand by his accusation about our president?” she said.
