Republican presumptive Presidential nominee Donald Trump, in his first speech after the Orlando shootings in which 49 people were killed, called again for a ban on Muslims entering the United States — and also suggested that somehow President Barack Obama was connected to the shootings. If the theory that Trump seeks to dominate a news cycle is true, it didn’t quite happen this time due to the continued grief throughout the country over the murders in Orlando. But his controversial comments — coupled with the assertion by his ally (some say his political alter ego) Roger Stone that Hillary Clinton’s aide top aide Huma Abedin could be a “Saudi spy” or a “terrorist agent” – dominated cable and media coverage when coverage wasn’t dealing with the horror story out of Orlando overshadowed Clinton’s speech, which called for reaching out to Muslims and a ban on assault weapons.

The Huffington Post ran these top headlines on Trump’s speech:

MADMAN-IN-CHIEF
Donald Trump Delivers Terrifying Post-Orlando Speech… Doubles Down On Muslim Ban… ‘I Don’t Want Them In Our Country’… Fearmongers On Refugee Crisis… ‘Radical Islam Is Coming To Our Shores’…
Suggests Arresting People Who Don’t Report Suspicious Neighbors…

Then a photo of Trump with these headlines:

Earlier: Says Obama May Be Sympathetic To Islamic Terrorism… Calls On President To Resign… Peddles Discredited ‘Good Guy With A Gun’ Myth… Revokes Washington Post Press Credentials For Reporting The News… Chait: Trump Is ‘The Fearmonger Republicans Have Been Waiting For’.

Here’s a chunk of their lead story:

Donald Trump ramped up his earlier call to ban Muslims from entering the country in a high-profile national security address on Monday — and made clear he believes he can do it with or without congressional approval.

“The immigration laws of the United States give the president powers to suspend entry into the country of any class of persons,” Trump told a small audience at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. “I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we fully understand how to end these threats.”

Trump’s promise to act unilaterally comes at the precise moment that GOP leaders in both the House and Senate are trying to rally Republicans behind their controversial presidential nominee-to-be with arguments that Congress could check his impulses.

Trump had given them a bit of room to make such assertions by calling his Muslim ban idea more of a suggestion in mid-May. On Monday, however, he went in the opposite direction, saying that he wanted to target Muslim countries outside the Middle East and that he’d lean on Muslim communities in America to cooperate with law enforcement. The more aggressive tone and platform came just a day and a half after 49 people were gunned down in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by the son of Afghan immigrants who, moments before opening fire, called 911 to declare his loyalty to the Islamic State terror group.

How Republican leaders in Congress will react to Trump’s most recent remarks is unclear.

What’s likely to occur is the continued evolution of the Republican Party into the Trumpublican Party.

For years, the Republican Party had been perceived as the stronger of the two parties on national security. This ranking eroded under Obama. Could the GOP resist the temptation to now put aside any reservations and hitch their future to Donald Trump talking as a national security strongman? Various analysts said Trump’s speech was riddled with inaccuracies, but being fact-challenged has not hurt Trump in an era when partisans will repeat falsehoods over and over as mantras and insist they are facts. Perhaps the new definition of a fact is something repeated ad nauseum then picked up by others who use the same mantra. That make’s it true.

And if the press calls you on it, cut the news outlet out of the loop by revoking its press privileges.

The HP also had this:

Legal scholars noted the irony of the presumptive Republican nominee adopting a broad view of executive power on matters of immigration at a time when House Republicans are suing President Barack Obama for utilizing similar legal authority. Obama has argued that federal law allows the president to prioritize certain categories of individuals for deportation. Trump is arguing that the law gives the president that same power in determining entry.

“If it is bad for Obama to do it, then it is bad for Trump to do it,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded professor at the University of Chicago and a well-regarded legal scholar.

He added, “Obama has a more generous soul on these questions than Trump, who is slightly crazy. But after yesterday’s killing, the gun-control solution will fall on deaf ears. … I think Trump will score points on this round. That’s my sense as somebody who loathes the man.”

Trump’s original call for a Muslim ban, made shortly after a Muslim husband and wife murdered 14 people at a county government office in San Bernardino, California, proved enormously popular with Republican primary voters. The real estate mogul often attributed his rise in the polls to that stance, which at the time was criticized by a number of his primary rivals.

Last month, Trump’s chief strategist, Paul Manafort, told The Huffington Post that the candidate has “already started moderating” on the Muslim ban. But Trump’s half-hour speech showed no indication that would happen in the foreseeable future.

He accused Obama and all-but-certain Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton of refusing to use the phrase “radical Islam” out of an insistence on political correctness — and made a point of using “radical Islam” and its related adjective form nearly two dozen times. (Obama and Clinton, like former President George W. Bush, have made a point of distinguishing Islam and its billion-plus followers from the much, much, much smaller number of terrorists who justify their acts through a harsher interpretation of that faith.)

“I want every American to succeed, including Muslims. But the Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad,” Trump said of the Orlando attacker. “They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in.”

He did not provide any evidence that unnamed Muslims knew the shooters in Orlando or San Bernardino were planning violent attacks.

Meanwhile, Trump suggested that the President of the United States may have somehow been in on or sympathized with killer:

Donald Trump seemed to repeatedly accuse President Obama on Monday of identifying with radicalized Muslims who have carried out terrorist attacks in the United States and being complicit in the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando over the weekend, the worst the country has ever seen.

“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said in a lengthy interview on Fox News early Monday morning. “And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”

In that same interview, Trump was asked to explain why he called for Obama to resign in light of the shooting and he answered, in part: “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.”

Matthew Yglesia’s analysis on Vox:

The point of a “major foreign policy address” is for a presidential candidate, who typically lacks foreign policy experience, to show that he or she is in the process of learning and capable of learning more in the future. Any president, after all, relies heavily on staff. It’s no shame not to know everything, but you have to show that you know you don’t know everything and are going to work with others to fill in the gaps.

On this score, Donald Trump’s speech this afternoon failed utterly. The bulk of it was dedicated to demagoguery, xenophobia, and bizarre lies about status quo immigration policy in the United States and Hillary Clinton’s proposals for gun regulation.

But the brief section — amounting to just over 150 words — in which Trump did talk about foreign policy as such was a mess. Over the course of seven sentences, Trump managed to contradict himself, distort his own record of statements on the relevant issues, and undermine the key policy plank — a ban on Muslims entering the United States — on which he’s built his entire national security agenda.

An effective president needs ideas that make sense, and he needs a team full of people who know more than he does about specifics and whom he trusts to stand up to him and steer him in the right direction. After hearing Trump’s speech on Monday, it’s clear that Trump has none of that and no interest in developing any of it.

Yglesias details all of the things wrong in the speech. Here’s one list:

*For starters, Trump supported the war in Libya even though he’s spent the entire 2016 campaign pretending that he didn’t.
The collapse of the Syrian state can’t be the fault of a US intervention to overthrow Assad, because we never mounted any such intervention.
*Trump, in the past, said the United States should intervene in Syria to create protected zones outside the authority of the Syrian government: “What I like is build a safe zone, it’s here, build a big, beautiful safe zone and you have whatever it is so people can live, and they’ll be happier.”
*Trump criticizes military interventions conducted “without plans for the day after” but his signature idea for fighting ISIS is to “bomb the shit out of” them, which is not much of a day-after plan.
*For that matter, planning for the day after is also known as nation building but Trump says he’s against nation building.
Trump criticizes the Iran deal on the grounds that America’s Persian Gulf allies didn’t like it, but Trump’s signature campaign proposal on terrorism is to ban all citizens from those countries from entering the United States, which they are really not going to like.
*Last but by no means least, Trump’s habit of insisting that every US military alliance — from NATO to our defense treaties with Japan and South Korea — should be scrutinized in narrow financial terms is the exact opposite of replicating the Cold War strategy to unite the civilized world.

On Trump’s suggestion that Obama is somehow connected to terrorists, Hit and Run nails this technique totally. Here’s part of it (go to the link to read it all):

This is the sort of language that Trump uses when he wants to seed an idea that cannot be stated directly. It allows him a measure of deniability later on, even while sending a clear signal to supporters inclined to listen.

And the signal that Trump is sending here is that President Obama is somehow connected with or inherently sympathetic to jihadists.

No, Trump is not explicitly saying that Obama has some sort of a link to Islamic extremists, but he is implicitly raising the possibility, drawing on lingering fears especially amongst GOP voters, that Obama is himself a Muslim. As recently as last September, 43 percent of voters said in a poll conducted by CNN that they believed President Obama was a Muslim; in a separate poll that same month, 54 percent of Republicans said the same.

Trump himself has helped stoke those fears for years with his own high-profile remarks about President Obama’s birth certificate.

…Trump’s hedged language and convoluted speaking style allow him to maintain the pretense that he is just raising questions, just following the facts to whatever conclusions they might reveal, even while raising dark possibilities that owe more to the plots of low-rent thrillers than to the mundane realities of American politics. He followed a similar course earlier this year when asked about the possibility that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia might have been murdered, saying, “they say they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow. I can’t give you an answer.” Trump has also appeared on the radio of prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and, at the end of the GOP primary race, suggested a link between rival candidate Ted Cruz’s father and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Given how frequently Trump indulges in this sort of brazenly paranoid rhetoric, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he either believes much of this nonsense himself, or he is cynically and deliberately spreading hate and false information in order to service his own image and agenda. As Trump might say, it’s one or the other—and either one is unacceptable.

On balance, Trump is (again) proving he is a candidate far outside the American political mainstream and outside the boundaries of our traditional political norms.

But if the Republican Party feels he can win the White House, it may go along with the ride of The Man on Horseback.

A CROSS SECTION OF TWEETS:

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JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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