Chilling headline of the day

PIERS MORGAN: When it comes to terror, isn’t it time we started listening seriously to Trump? 

By coincidence, I had an interview scheduled today with the world’s most controversial man, Donald Trump, for my UK show, Good Morning Britain.

It was set up a couple of weeks ago, but the timing was eerily prescient.

Here is one man who definitely has a plan to deal with ISIS terrorism. Several plans in fact. 

The problem is that people don’t like them. Well, a lot of people don’t anyway.

Trump, current front-runner for the Republican nomination, wants to hit ISIS ‘so hard they never recover’.

(As he told me: ‘You've got to take them out and you've got to take them out harshly and you've got to take them out fast.’)

He also wants a short-term ban on Muslims entering the U.S. until, as he puts it, ‘we figure out what the hell is going on?’

And he wants to torture suspects like Abdeslam with techniques like water-boarding to try and extract information about future attacks.

Oh, and he wants to build a giant wall to stop illegal immigrants pouring over the Mexican border into America.

George Clooney hit out at Trump yesterday, as he endorsed Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton for the presidency, saying: ‘If you listen to the loudest voices out there today, you'd think we're a country that hates Mexicans, hates Muslims, and thinks that committing war crimes is the best way to make America great again.’

I spoke to Trump for 40 minutes. He was, as you’d expect, bombastic, defiant and self-congratulatory. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s ripped up every political rulebook to take this presidential race by storm, a scenario that is hardly going to deflate the ego of New York’s most cock-sure billionaire tycoon.

But he also spoke in more detail about his plans to combat ISIS and I found myself nodding more than I expected.

Trump told me countries must tighten their borders in light of these terror attacks, especially to anyone related to an ISIS fighter in Syria.

Is he so wrong?

He told me he wants law-abiding Muslims to root out the extremists in their midst, expressing his bafflement and anger that someone like Abdeslam was able to hide for so long in the very part of Brussels he had previously lived.

Is he so wrong?

He told me America must make it far harder for illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. and thinks European countries should follow suit.

Is he so wrong?

He told me he believes there are now areas of many major European cities which have become poisonous breeding grounds for radicalized Islamic terror.

Is he so wrong?

I didn’t feel I was talking to a lunatic, as many seem to view Trump.

I saw a guy, a non-politician unfettered by PC language restraints, who is genuinely furious at the devastation which ISIS is wreaking, and seriously concerned for the security of his fellow Americans and indeed, the citizens of Europe.

(Remember, Trump’s from New York and felt the horror of 9/11 very personally and very deeply like all New Yorkers.)

His plans for tackling this extraordinarily dangerous threat to the world have been widely condemned as ‘bigoted’ and ‘racist’.

But although I publicly criticised him for the Muslim short-term ban suggestion, I’ve known Trump for ten years and I don’t believe he’s a racist.

I think he’s someone who has spent his life responding to metaphorical punches on his nose by punching even harder back.

And right now, he firmly believes that ISIS will murder countless more Americans and Europeans if somebody somewhere doesn’t stand up and punch them hard in the face.

Someone prepared to stop spewing politically-correct niceties after these attacks, hoping nobody gets offended, and actually DO something.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, right now ISIS is winning this war and will continuing committing utter carnage on our streets on an ever graver and more barbaric scale until they are stopped.
I don’t have the answers to how to do that.

But I don’t hear any good ideas coming from any world leaders at the moment either, and it’s their highly paid jobs to work it out.

Instead, I see a global paralysis driven by fear, confusion and woeful lack of leadership.
And it will only get worse.

Hate Donald Trump all you like, but at least he seems to recognise the magnitude of the threat and at least he has firm proposals for how to try to defeat it.

They may not win him the Politically Correct Pontificator of the Year award. But how many more scenes like this morning’s appalling images from Brussels are we going to tolerate before we try a non-PC option to beat these disgusting excuses for human beings?

At the end of our interview, I asked Donald Trump to send a message to the large majority of non-violent, decent Muslims who are as disgusted by these attacks as the rest of us.

‘I have great respect for Muslims,’ he said, ‘I have many friends that are Muslims. I'm just saying that there is something with a radicalized portion that is very, very bad and very dangerous. I would say this, to the Muslims, when they see trouble, they have to report it, they're not reporting it, they're absolutely not reporting it and that's a big problem.’

Is he so wrong?

“What should happen is the United States and a bunch of other countries should get together—funded by the Gulf States, because they have tremendous amounts of money—and we should build a safe zone,” Trump said. “It should be in Syria. Or a number of safe zones, in different parts of Syria, where you build until the war ends and they can go back—if they want to—they can go back to where they want to be."