Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney said he thought President Trump handled his address to Congress “overall terrifically” on Wednesday morning’s Breitbart News Daily.
Gaffney said:
If I could just make one sort of overarching observation, it seemed to me, as it’s being noted by a lot of people, this was a very presidential address. Which, I think, came as a surprise to some. It was also a very principled address, and the real message here is, they were his principles. He was not abandoning the beliefs and the promises and the policies that he had laid out up to this point. I think it’s fair to say he packaged them brilliantly, and I think that’s especially true in the national security space.
The main themes of that were easy to recognize: sovereignty, and a commitment to re-establishing a principle that he’s referred to, as had my old boss Ronald Reagan, as ‘peace through strength.’ Rebuilding our national security, and protecting our people, and building that great, great wall, and dealing with the threats that are internal to our country – whether it’s drug traffickers, or gangs, or violent illegal aliens of other stripes, or the people who are trying to create beachheads of terrorism. I think that is, if not an explicit reference, then certainly a code for the Muslim Brotherhood.
After SiriusXM host Alex Marlow played a clip of Trump delivering the remarks in question, Gaffney said he thought the president was properly concerned with “people coming here from elsewhere, imbued with a different value system than we have — and I think specifically what that suggests is an appropriate concern about what I think is best described as sharia supremacism.”
Gaffney defined sharia supremacism as “a value system that says it’s not the U.S. Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees that should govern our people, it is sharia: a totalitarian, brutally repressive doctrine that the Islamic world has long sought to impose — not all but a lot of it.”
“It’s not just the people who come here to do the violence, it’s the infrastructure that they can tap into, whether it’s mosques and madrassas or influence operations, front groups, Islamic societies, Islamic cultural centers. That’s of concern as well, and I think he’s absolutely right, and it is such a refreshing thing to have him talking about it,” he said.
He also praised Trump for focusing on “what he calls radical Islamic terrorism.”
“Reports that advisers, that others in his administration don’t agree with that term notwithstanding, he’s clear-eyed about it, and he’s going to try to take it down,” Gaffney said.
Marlow said it was “incredible” to hear a president use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” and doubted Hillary Clinton would have been able to say it.
“It wasn’t said at all in the administration in which she served, the Obama administration,” Gaffney observed. “And frankly, it wasn’t possible to say it in the George W. Bush administration. It’s been 16 years getting this right, and I think it’s a huge step forward.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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