Donald Trump on Tuesday accused President Barack Obama of being angrier at him than at the gunman who perpetrated the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.
“I watched President Obama today and he was more angry at me than he was at the shooter,” Trump said, drawing boos from the crowd. “The level of anger, that’s the kind of anger that he should have for the shooter and these killers that shouldn’t be here.”
Obama passionately excoriated Trump during a speech earlier in the day for demonizing Muslims and defying American values in his response to the terrorist attack in Orlando, calling Trump’s mindset “dangerous.”
Trump also said if Obama had been a “great president,” the businessman would have been happy.
“But I’ll tell you what he’s been one hell of a lousy president, he’s done a terrible job,” he said.
Trump also offered similarly fiery criticism of his likely general election opponent, Hillary Clinton, who has also been harshly critical of Trump’s response to the terrorist threat.
“If Hillary Clinton becomes president I don’t know that our country will ever, ever come back – I mean it,” Trump said.
Trump criticized Clinton’s call to resettle more Syrian refugees in the U.S. and accused her of being complicit in Saudi Arabia’s flagrantly poor human rights record because the Clinton Foundation has accepted funds from the kingdom.
As he did in his national security speech Monday, Trump accused Clinton of being “no friend of LGBT Americans” because of those donations and her views on confronting terrorism, which do not include a ban on refugees or Muslims entering the U.S.
Clinton’s campaign manager is openly gay, and her campaign boasts many prominent LGBT supporters, including the Human Rights Campaign, which endorsed her in January.
While Trump pressed on with his overtures to the LGBT community – with whom Trump expressed solidarity with on Monday – his supporters met that appeal to LGBT Americans with a tepid, if not muted response in North Carolina, which recently passed a law banning transgender individuals from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
Trump also reveled in his decision to ban The Washington Post from covering his rallies due to what he deemed the newspaper’s “dishonest” coverage – one unprecedented in modern American political history.
“We just took the press credentials away. I love it! We just took the press credentials away from the dishonest Washington Post,” Trump said as the audience erupted in raucous cheers and applause.