President Donald Trump has defended his status as a ‘nationalist’, saying it means he is proud of the United States and that he loves his country.
In a wide-ranging Fox News interview Monday night, Trump also denied having links to anti-Semitism following Saturday’s deadly synagogue shooting and labeled the pipe bomber who targeted high-profile Democrats last week as ‘insane’.
Trump told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that he didn’t need to clarify recent comments made at a Houston rally where he called himself a nationalist after critics claimed it meant he was associating himself with white nationalists.
‘No. To me, I don’t have to clarify. It means I love the country. I look at two things: Globalists and nationalists. I’m somebody who wants to take care of our country because for many, many years, our leaders… have been more worried about the world than about the United States,’ Trump said.
In a wide-ranging Fox News interview Monday night, President Trump defended his status as a ‘nationalist’, saying it means he is proud of the United States and that he loves his country
‘They leave us in a mess, whether it’s the wars, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s debt, whether it’s all of the things that they’ve done, including putting in the wrong Supreme Court Justices and we’ve really put two great ones in.
‘I’m proud of this country and I call that ‘nationalism’; I call it being a nationalist and I don’t see any other connotation than that. Now, as soon as you make any statement nowadays with the political correctness world, they make a big deal. I’m not a globalist, but I want to take care of the globe, but first I have to take care of our country. I want to help people around the world, but we have to take care of our country, or we won’t have a country.’
Trump rejected suggestions that he should be blamed for a spate of recent attacks, including the pipe bomber who targeted the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and CNN last week by mailing them explosive devices.
‘You look at his medical records. He was insane for a long time,’ Trump said of Cesar Sayoc, the man arrested over the pipe bombs.
The President also denied having links to anti-Semitism after Saturday’s shooting massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue by pointing out that his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are Jewish.
Trump told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that he didn’t need to clarify recent comments made at a Houston rally where he called himself a nationalist after critics claimed it meant he was associating himself with white nationalists
He accused some media outlets of hypocrisy following the recent attacks, saying no one put Bernie Sanders’ name in the spotlight when one of his supporters opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball game last year.
‘Bernie Sanders had a fan who shot a very good friend of ours, Steve Scalise, and other people,’ Trump said. ‘He was a total maniac. Nobody puts his name in the headline, Bernie Sanders in the headline.’
Meanwhile, earlier in the day White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the media of wrongly blaming Trump for the mail bomb plot and the synagogue shooting.
She said Monday at a press briefing that the first thing the president did was condemn the attacks and the first thing the media did was blame the president.
Trump critics have said the president’s harsh partisan rhetoric has fueled such attacks.
Sanders told reporters that people should place the responsibility for the two attacks on the individuals responsible.
Florida resident Cesar Sayoc is charged with federal crimes in the mail bomb plot on high-ranking Democratic officials and CNN. Meanwhile, Robert Bowers is charged with killing 11 people in what is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.
Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, is the latest Democrat to incur the wrath of Donald Trump shortly before the November 6, 2018 midterm elections, with the president branding Gillum a ‘thief’ running a corrupt city
Trump also attacked Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, calling him a ‘stone cold thief’, as he accused the Tallahassee mayor of running a corrupt city.
‘His city, Tallahassee, is known as the most corrupt in Florida and one of the most corrupt in the nation. He’s a disaster and how he’s even close to being tied is hard to believe,’ Trump said.
‘But Florida can’t have – if Florida has a governor like that – and I know Florida better than I know practically anywhere – Florida will become Venezuela. It will be a disaster.
‘You have Ron SeSantis, who is a Harvward/Yale guy, he’s had a really terrific, you know he’s a good person. He’s going to be a great governor.
‘This other guy is a stone cold, in my opinion, he’s a thief. How can you have a guy like this? Look at… the job he’s done as the mayor of Tallahassee. He’s a total disaster.’