NEW YORK: The Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump doubled down on his previous calls of stopping the tide of Muslim immigration in the United States.

Asked in an interview with the MSNBC on Wednesday after beating all his rivals for the nomination, he said: “I don’t care if it hurts me. I’m doing the right thing when I do this. And whether it’s Muslim or whether it’s something else, I mean, I have to do the right thing and that’s the way I’ve been guided. And I’ve been guided by common sense, by what’s right.”

He went on to say: “Look at what’s happening. It’s terrible what they have done to some of these countries … They are destroying Europe. I’m not going to let that happen to the United States.”

Trump then criticised President Obama for his refusal to even use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”, and said under his watch – under a Trump presidency – “common sense” would prevail.

“We have to be careful,” Trump said. “We’re allowing thousands of people to come into our country, thousands and thousands of people being placed all over the country that frankly nobody knows who they are. They don’t have documentation in many cases. In most cases, we don’t know what we’re doing. Let’s see what happens. This could be a very serious problem for the future.”

Bobby Knight, a former basketball coach, who endorsed Trump for the election, was asked about Trump’s views on Muslim immigration.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2016