Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate developer and former reality TV star who is whipping up a storm in the 2016 presidential election, told a crowd of police officers in New Hampshire on Thursday night that he was starting to win the debate about cutting off all Muslim immigration into the US.
As the fall-out continues from his highly contentious proposal to close the country to all incoming Muslims for a temporary period in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, Trump audaciously claimed that the nation was starting to swing behind him. “We have people talking, I’ll tell you that,” the Republican frontrunner said, “and they’re talking very positively.”
He described the worldwide furor that was provoked by his call on Monday for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders to Muslims as “an interesting few days”. But the public was beginning to agree with him, he said, just as they had done over his earlier contentious plan to build a wall along the Mexican border.
“They are saying ‘Trump is right. Trump has a point.’”
The Republican frontrunner made his remarks at the Sheraton hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the New England Police Benevolent Association was voting to endorse him as its presidential candidate. After he received the endorsement from the police union, Trump promised that he would “never, ever let the police and law enforcement in this country down”.
He also unveiled his latest headline-catching campaign wheeze. Were he to win the race to the White House, he said, one of his earliest acts would be to pass an executive order mandating the death penalty for any killer of a police officer.
“Police officers throughout this country have had a hard time. A lot of people have been killed violently,” he said, without mentioning the widespread national unrest over police shootings of unarmed black teenagers.
The idea of imposing the death penalty for killing a law enforcer is almost certainly a chimera as US presidents only have power to influence sentencing in the minority of cases that are deemed federal homicides. Most murders are left under the US constitution to the individual states to decide.
Trump’s contention that he was beginning to win the debate on Muslim immigration was to some extent supported by a new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. It suggested that more Republicans favor his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the US than oppose it.
According to the poll, 42% of Republican voters support the presidential candidate’s plan while 36% oppose it. When only Republican primary voters are included, support falls to 38% supporting and 39% opposing the plan.
Yet while more Republican voters seem comfortable with Trump’s controversial proposal, it is still fiercely opposed by most Americans. Fifty-seven percent of all respondents across party lines oppose Trump’s plan to bar Muslims from entering the United States and only 25% support it.
The poll is not the first to find widespread GOP support for Trump’s advocacy of imposing a religious test for anyone entering the United States. An online poll conducted by Bloomberg Politics on Wednesday found that 65% of likely Republican primary voters supported Trump’s plan.
Trump has also improved his standing in national polls since calling for the ban. In a new poll from the New York Times and CBS News released on Thursday, the real estate mogul received support from 35% of Republican primary voters nationally.
The Porstmouth event with police officers attracted one of the largest anti-Trump protests yet. About 200 people assembled outside the Sheraton brandishing placards that said “LOVE>HATE” and “We welcome refugees”.
In an attempt to drown them out, organizers of Trump’s visit to the police union blasted out the sounds of the 1980s Twisted Sister song We’re Not Gonna Take It.
Some of the anti-Trump protesters were paradoxically Republicans. One of them, Harrison Debree, 28, held up a placard that said “Trump: America’s Hitler” with a photograph of the candidate with a Hitler moustache etched on it.
Debree normally votes Republican but said he was so unhappy about the messages being put out by Trump that he was seriously now considering voting for the leading Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
“I don’t like the way that Trump is assaulting the Bill of Rights, like this week’s statement on closing the US to Muslims – that’s an attack on the First Amendment religious test. He’s more of a threat to the Constitution than even the Democrats are.”
Inside the hotel, police officers packed into the ballroom to see Trump were generally in support of his plan to shutdown the country to incoming Muslims. Heather Ross, 43, a New Hampshire state law enforcement officer, said that she thought it was a good idea.
“Our own country’s security needs to come first. It’s too bad if it hurts people’s feelings,” she said.
Dennis Rizzuto, 49, a police officer from Carver, Massachusetts, said that he had been a Trump supporter for a long time. He said he supported the billionaire’s immigration proposals, and if anything he would go even further.
“I think we need to get a grip on our borders, period. We should consider closing the borders to anyone coming in to this country no matter who they are.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Trump’s national policy adviser, Sam Clovis, defended the plan as a reasonable way for the United States to “stop, take a break, have a look and make sure everything is cool”.
However, many other Republicans condemned it. His rival for the GOP nomination, Senator Lindsey Graham, told the Guardian that “Donald Trump today took xenophobia and religious bigotry to a new level”, while former vice-president Dick Cheney said in a radio interview that Trump’s plan “goes against everything we believe in”.
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