Republican presidential ticket frontrunner Donald Trump on Monday called to bar Muslims from entering the United States hours after signs that a competitor had overtaken him in the polls.
Trump called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” his campaigners said in a press release, citing an unspecified Pew Research study said “there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population.”
“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension,” Mr Trump said in the email.
Earlier Monday, a report from New Jersey’s Monmouth University Polling Center showed Senator Cruz beat Mr Trump in a poll of Iowa Republicans likely to attend the Iowa caucus. Of those polled, 24 percent said they would vote for Senator Cruz and 19 percent said they would vote for Mr Trump. Marco Rubio came in third with 17 percent.
Trump’s incendiary comments on ethnic minorities and differently abled people have provoked criticism from US liberals, but his significant fan base often lauds his apparent disdain for political correctness.
US Muslims lambasted Trump's comments.
“It’s just absolutely mind-boggling the nation’s leading GOP presidential candidate would issue what amounts to almost a fascist statement and thinks he’ll get support for it and probably will get support for it,” Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Independent.
We’ve always had extremists and fringe characters in the political arena, but the fringe characters are now the center of things.”
