WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday (June 13) said the United States needs to increase its military response against Islamic State in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting over the weekend, and faulted the Muslim community for not reporting people like the man who carried out the attack.
The presumptive Republican nominee, in an interview on Fox News, also said he would address acts of terrorism in his speech at 2pm EDT (2am Tuesday Singapore time) in New Hampshire, which he had earlier planned to use to target Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Trump told CNN in another interview he thought Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was known to people in the Muslim community as someone with a potential for violence.
"You will find that many people that knew him felt that he was a whack job ... (that) something like this would have happened," Trump told CNN in a phone interview.
"People that knew him, the ex-wife, other people. They don't report them. For some reason the Muslim community does not report people like this."
Trump said the United States needed better intelligence-gathering to prevent such things from happening.
"We have to look at the mosques ... and we have to look at the community," he said. "And believe me, the community knows the people that have the potential to blow up."
Fifty people, including Mateen, the US-born son of Afghan immigrants, died in at the gay nightclub on Sunday in what was the deadliest shooting in US history.
Democratic presidential candidate Clinton said the United States must find a way to keep the country safe without demonising Muslim Americans.
In an interview with MSNBC, Clinton said she would support stronger measures to prevent so-called lone wolf attacks and urged closer Internet monitoring, but said she was committed to protecting the rights of Muslim Americans at the same time.
"We cannot demonise, demagogue and declare war on an entire religion. That is just dangerous," Clinton said on the MSNBC network.
She also called for steps to prevent people who are on the US no-fly list from purchasing guns and said possible restrictions on assault weapons needed to be part of the debate.
