Transcript: Hillary Clinton says Trump is ‘shameful’ and ‘Americans don’t need conspiracy theories’

I read every word of Donald Trump’s speech yesterday. And I sifted through all the bizarre rants and the outright lies.

What I found, once you cut through the nonsense, is that his plan comes down to two things.

First, he is fixated on the words ‘radical Islam.’ I must say, I find this strange. Is Donald Trump suggesting that there are magic words that, once uttered, will stop terrorists from coming after us? Trump, as usual, is obsessed with name-calling. From my perspective, it matters what we do, not just what we say. In the end, it didn’t matter what we called bin Laden – it mattered that we got bin Laden.

Omar Mateen was tracked by the FBI, told by Disney he was “casing” the property and aligns with Islamic State

I have clearly said that we face terrorist enemies who use a perverted version of Islam to justify slaughtering innocent people. We have to stop them, and we will. So if Donald suggests I won’t call this threat what it is, he hasn’t been listening.

But I will not demonize and declare war on an entire religion.

Now that we’re past the semantic debate, Donald is going to have to come up with something better.

He’s got one other idea. He wants to ban all Muslims from entering our country. And now he wants to go even further, and suspend all immigration from large parts of the world.

I’ve talked before about how this approach is un-American.  It goes against everything we stand for as a country founded on religious freedom. But it is also dangerous. First, we rely on partners in Muslim countries to fight terrorists; this would make it harder. Second, we need to build trust in Muslim communities here at home to counter radicalization; and this would make it harder.  Third, Trump’s words will be, in fact they already are, a recruiting tool for ISIS to help increase its ranks of people willing to do what we saw in Orlando. And fourth, he’s turning Americans against Americans, which is exactly what ISIS wants.

Leaders who’ve actually fought terrorists know this. General Petraeus said recently that ‘demonizing a religious faith and its adherents’ will come at a great cost, not just to our values but to our men and women in uniform and our national security.

Commissioner Bill Bratton of the New York Police Department said this kind of talk makes his job harder. He has Muslims in his police force, he has Muslims in the community, he needs everybody working together against any potential threat.

But Donald won’t listen to any of this. Not experts like General Petraeus or Commissioner Bratton, because he says he knows more about ISIS than the generals do. It’s almost hard to think of what to say about that claim.

But in this instance, Donald’s words are especially nonsensical. Because the terrorist who carried out this attack wasn’t born in Afghanistan, as Donald Trump said yesterday. He was born in Queens – just like Donald was himself. So Muslim bans and immigration reforms would not have stopped him. They would not have saved a single life in Orlando.

Those are the only two ideas Donald Trump put forward yesterday for how to fight ISIS.