Trump talks of Muslim ban in opening TV ads

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump is giving some of the most divisive proposals of his campaign a starring role in his first major television ad, as the unsettled race for the party’s nomination swi-rls around security concerns. With the opening 2016 primary contest four weeks away, the billionaire businessman is spotlighting his plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States — temporarily and with exceptions, he says — and to build a wall along the southern border.

Mr Trump’s campaign says he plans to spend $2 million a week on the ad, set to begin airing on Tuesday across the first two states to cast votes in the Republican nominating contest. Io-wa hosts the nation’s kickoff presidential ca-ucuses on February 1 and New Hampshire follows with the opening primary election on February 9.

Mr Trump’s proposal on Muslims has been condemned by Republi-cans and Democrats as un-American and counterproductive, yet the hardline approach to immigration has fuelled his popularity among the overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate.

The new ad features dark images of the San Bernardino shooters, who were Muslims, and body bags. “The politicians can pretend it’s something else. But Donald Trump calls it radical Islamic terrorism. That’s why he’s calling for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on,” a narrator says.

Video footage later in the ad shows people apparently streaming freely across a border as the narrator says Mr Trump will “stop illegal immigrants by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for.”

Facing questions from news outlets, the Trump campaign acknowledged on Monday that the border images were of a Spanish enclave in Morocco, not the US-Mexican border.