Donald Trump senior campaign adviser Barry Bennett Tuesday shot back at complaints from Hillary Clinton that the presumptive GOP nominee has been isolating a religion by his call for a temporary ban on Muslims, saying more needs to be understood about keeping radical Islamists out of the United States.
"We have to understand a lot more about radical Islam and how we can screen these people from not coming into our country, and how we can find these lone wolves and what causes them to radicalize," Bennett told Fox News' Bill Hemmer on the
"America's Newsroom" program. "We now have two cases now tied to this mosque in central Florida. Unfortunately, this is an example of our government where it's failed us yet again."
And Clinton's response, Bennett said, is to ban guns, while Trump is "far more interested in banning terrorists."
Clinton this week changed her comments on radical Islam. In the past, she had declined the term, but after Sunday's deadly nightclub shootings in Orlando, she commented that "radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing."
But President Barack Obama, Bennett said, "still can't even call the terrorists by their proper name. I'm excited, you know, that she's been willing to do that now for, I guess, 24 hours. But, I mean, it doesn't solve the problem, right?"
Bennett also addressed Trump's ban on
reporters from The Washington Post covering his events, telling Hemmer that the reporter covering Trump wrote a story that was "pretty reprehensible ... we asked them to fix it, they refused to fix it, you know, so we'll let some other reporter take his spot."
And he pointed out that the Post has not been banned from coverage, but just on being part of the traveling pool of reporters.
"It's just a question of who gets to travel with us in the press plane and all that kind of stuff," said Bennett. "If you've tried to work with a reporter over and over again and you just can't get a fair shake, then let's give that seat to somebody who will."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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