NEW YORK — In a loud and unpleasant conversation with reporters, US presidential candidate Donald J. Trump defended statements made earlier in the week in which he said he was open to the idea of a comprehensive database of Muslim Americans, suggesting that a database would “definitely, absolutely, definitely” stop domestic terrorism.
“First off, I’m beginning to resent you liberal boneheads calling Donald Trump a racist,” Trump told a reporter from NBC News. “Some of my best friends are in databases. I’ve got a friend who’s in the organ donor registry. I’ve got a friend who accidentally clicked on one of those internet ads, he’s in a database now. I have a 95 year old Jewish friend who said he was once in a database. The guy’s a champ.”
Accusations that Trump was fueling anti-Muslim sentiment were met with further defense from the business magnate and former TV star.
“Listen, I’ve got friends in Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. I’m not saying all Muslims would have to be in this database. Just ones making less than fifty million a year.” Trump told a reporter from Yahoo! News.
After briefly defending the idea, Trump doubled-down on his comments, describing other potential registration security systems for American citizens. His list included a database of Democratic voters, a database of “PC-brainwashing” college professors and a vaguely defined database of “losers”. A spokesman for Trump’s campaign suggested that these databases could be run by an old division of IBM that tracked “camps in Germany or something.”
In response to Trump’s Muslim database comments, leading Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson insisted he won the Medal of Honor twice.
