Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sunday that he doubted the terrorist attacks on 9/11 would have happened if he were President and had his illegal immigration policies in place.
Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday” asked Trump about comments he made about President George W. Bush’s role in preventing the attacks of Sept. 11 — which were criticized by President Bush’s brother and GOP hopeful Jeb Bush.
Trump had said in an interview aired Friday, “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Trump reiterated that stance to Wallace on Sunday.
“What would you have done?” Wallace asked Trump.
“Well, I would have been much different, I must tell you,” Trump said. “I am extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration. I’m extremely tough on people coming into this country. I believe that if I were running things, I doubt those families would have — I doubt that those people would have been in the country.”
“So there’s a good chance that those people would not have been in our country,” Trump continued.
Trump said that he didn’t put blame on President Bush.
“With that being said, I’m not blaming George Bush,” Trump said. “But I don’t want Jeb Bush to say my brother kept us safe because September 11th was one of the worst days in the history of this country.”
Only if his “immigration policy” includes a time machine.
I don’t want to blame George W. Bush for letting the attacks happen, I just want to claim credit for retroactively preventing the illegal immigration that had nothing to do with them. Or something. Because I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about and never do.
So how would he decide who comes to visit the US? None of the attackers were trying to emigrate here. I wonder what the airlines would think about having fewer trans-oceanic passengers.
I’m scared.
Whether or not one blames Bush, and I do, I’m really glad someone is finally forcefully making this point. You can argue that Bush couldn’t have prevented the 9/11 attacks, one can claim the PDBs were too vague, etc. But it’s outrageous to allow Jeb!, W, and the entire Bush administration to continue to claim they weren’t in charge while simultaneously praising themselves for taking charge. It either happened on your watch or it didn’t, but they shouldn’t be able to continue pretending the attacks occurred on 01/20/2001 at 11:59 am.