The Slatest

John Kerry Says GOP Campaign Rhetoric Is “Embarrassment to Our Country”

Secretary of State John Kerry attends a ceremony at the Brussels National Airport to pay tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks on March 25, 2016 in Zaventem.  

Photo by FREDERIC SIERAKOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Secretary of State John Kerry said global leaders are “shocked” about the violent, anti-Muslim rhetoric that is being heard on the campaign trial. “It upsets people’s sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions the way they’re posed to me it’s clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country,” Kerry said on CBS’ Face the Nation.

Although he didn’t mention anyone by name, it seemed evident Kerry was referring to the rhetoric in the GOP camp with Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump calling for greater surveillance of Muslim communities.

As if on cue, Cruz and Trump repeated their previous talking points on the issue on Sunday, making it clear neither one of them is backing down from previous statements that drew a link between refugees and immigrants to terrorism. Cruz was harshly critical of President Obama’s plan to accept Syrian refugees. “Enough is enough,” Cruz told Fox News Sunday. “We need a commander-in-chief who will protect this nation…This is a policy of weakness and appeasement.”

Trump told ABC News’ This Week that Americans should be afraid of living in their own country because a terrorist could attack any minute. “I don’t think America is a safe place for Americans, you want to know the truth,” he said when he was asked whether he would travel to Europe with his family after last week’s terror attack in Brussels. “We’re allowing thousands of people to come in here. Nobody knows where they’re from. Nobody knows who they are and they’re coming in here by the thousands and let me tell you something, we’re going to have problems.”

John Miller, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism for the New York Police Department, harshly criticized Cruz for his plan to target Muslim communities. “When you have people campaigning through fear and using that as leverage, and then giving advice to police to be the cudgel of that fear, that’s not the direction American policing should be taking in a democracy,” he said. NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News on Sunday in which he slammed Cruz, saying he “knows absolutely nothing about counterterrorism.”

The criticism also came from Republicans. “To send inflammatory messages could actually have an unintended consequence,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, said on Face the Nation.