Donald Trump responded to President Barack Obama’s criticism of his rhetoric on Islam and terrorism on Tuesday night, accusing the president of directing his anger at him rather than at the perpetrator of Sunday’s mass shooting in Florida.

Trump’s response comes as the shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando has made gun violence and terrorism an early hot-button issue in the general election, with Democratic leaders launching a coordinated attack on the New York billionaire on Tuesday as Republican leaders largely left their party’s presumptive nominee to defend himself. The response also continued Trump’s pattern of statements that obliquely suggest Obama might be sympathetic to perpetrators of terrorist attacks.


“He was more angry at me than he was at the shooter, and many people said that. One of the folks on television said, ‘Boy, has Trump gotten under his skin,'” said Trump at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, as his supporters booed at the mention of the president. “That’s the kind of anger he should have for the shooter and these killers that shouldn’t be here.”

The businessman returned to the topic later in the rally, saying of Obama, “Boy, does he hate Donald Trump.”

On Monday, Trump repeatedly made vague insinuations about Obama’s handling of terrorism, saying, “He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands,” and Tuesday’s remarks built on the businessman’s picture of a president with misplaced sympathies.

Trump's Tuesday remarks came in response to remarks Obama made earlier Tuesday, during a meeting with the National Security Council at the Treasury Department, that took a clear swipe at Trump’s “yapping” on issues of terrorism, Islam and immigration. “We are starting to see where this kind of rhetoric and loose talk and sloppiness about who exactly we are fighting, where this can lead us,” Obama said. “We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee of the United States, the Republican nominee to bar all Muslims from immigrating into America.”

Trump also took on presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, calling her “no friend of LGBT Americans” and unpopular with women.

“She’s taken $25 million from certain countries that treat women horrendously, that kill gays,” said Trump, repeating his call for Clinton to return Saudi donations made to her family’s foundation. Since 1999, Saudi Arabia had donated between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In a rally in Pittsburgh earlier Tuesday, Clinton said Trump’s Monday speech on terrorism and national security, in which he reiterated his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, consisted of “bizarre rants.”

In addition to Democrats, Trump continued his assault on the news media. “I love it! We just took the press credentials away from the dishonest Washington Post,” he said, before wondering aloud where the newspaper's reporter was. “Maybe they’re in the back,” he said. Despite the revocation of credentials, the Post's Jenna Johnson reported from the event.

Trump also continued to make the case for restricting the entrance of Muslims into the United States, saying that it took only a small percentage of immigrants from the Middle East to create a significant problem. “How does this kind of immigration make our life better in this country?” Trump asked. “How does it do it?”

Trump alluded to the fact that the perpetrator of Sunday’s attack — which left 49 people dead and was the deadliest mass shooting in American history and the most deadly terror attack on American soil since 9/11 — was the son of Muslim Afghan immigrants. “The children of Muslim immigrant parents, they’re responsible for a growing number, for whatever reasons, a growing number of terrorist attacks,” he said.

Trump met earlier Tuesday with a group of Republican governors, including North Carolina’s Pat McCrory, and said they complained to him about the Obama administration’s resettlement of refugees.

“They’re like being snuck into certain communities, and governors don’t even know who’s coming into their communities,” Trump said.

Trump tied the issue to Clinton, saying she wanted to increase the number of Syrian refugees entering the United States by 550 percent and that doing so would cost “hundreds of billions” of dollars. PolitiFact rated a similar previous claim made by Trump that cited a 500 percent increase as “mostly true.” Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, did not immediately respond to a request for documentation of the costs claimed by Trump.

Trump also foreshadowed a broader crackdown on terrorism, but he did not spell out specifics. “Everything is going to be fair. There’s going to be total justice,” he said. “But we can’t continue to live this way.”

