Priebus: ‘I don’t agree’ with Trump on Muslim immigration
Republican Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said he doesn’t agree with Donald Trump’s recent call to ban all Muslim immigration to the United States in light of national security concerns.
“I don’t agree,” Priebus told The Washington Examiner in a Tuesday interview.
{mosads}”We need to aggressively take on radical Islamic terrorism but not at the expense of our American values.”
The chairman’s response comes the day after Trump sent out a statement that said the U.S. should impose a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” While a Trump spokeswoman told The Hill the plan would affect “everyone” when asked it if would bar American Muslims traveling abroad from returning, Trump clarified Tuesday morning to ABC News that American citizens would be exempt.
Priebus’s response was not as forceful as the course taken by many of Trump’s GOP rivals. Jeb Bush called Trump “unhinged,” while John Kasich chalked it up to “more of the outrageous divisiveness that characterizes his every breath.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Ohio) took the rare step of admonishing Trump’s rhetoric during a news conference Tuesday to say it is “not what this party stands for.”
While state GOP chairs in South Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire have condemned Trump, the controversy has put the national party in a tough spot. Priebus has pledged not to meddle in the primary, trekking down to New York City to sign a deal aimed at preventing Trump from running a third party candidacy, which the real estate magnate has floated as a possibility if he is not treated “fairly.”
Democrats instantly jumped on the comments to question whether GOP presidential candidates would still honor that deal and support Trump if he wins the party’s nomination. And the Democratic National Committee chided Priebus for his recent comment that Trump is a “net positive” for the party.
“Donald Trump is indeed a ‘net positive’ for the Republican Party — as their Chairman called him — because he shows America what the Republican Party really stands for with his rhetoric that only helps enemies like ISIL/Daesh to recruit extremists,” Christina Freundlich, a DNC spokeswoman, said in a statement using two alternative names for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
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