Donald Trump has defended his ban on Muslims coming to America, saying it had to be implemented quickly to prevent “bad dudes” from entering the country.
As the world continued to reel from the executive order, Trump sent angry tweets on Monday denying that the chaos it caused at airports this weekend was his fault.
He then tweeted about the “ban”, despite having insisted over the weekend that the order stopping people entering the US from seven Muslim countries was not actually a “ban”.
Echoing his comment from October that there were “bad hombres out there”, Trump tweeted: “If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the ‘bad’ would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”
It is unclear why the word “dudes” was in quote marks.
More than 1.2 million people have signed a petition calling for Trump’s state visit to Britain to be cancelled and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to take in refugees kept out of America.
Still, opponents were caught out by the US President calling his opponents “dudes”.
On Saturday, Trump issued a statement saying: “To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting.
“This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe.”
But now he’s tweeted it’s a ban and one person reminded us of the language Trump used when he originally mooted the idea back in December 2015, when he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.