Donald Trump’s recent remarks about Islam — constitutionality aside — have gotten so out of control that he is now a threat to national security.

He has recently made inaccurate claims that thousands of people in New Jersey, most of them being Arabs, celebrated the attacks of 9/11 immediately after the attacks. He then proposed that a registry of all Muslims in the US be implemented, and just this Tuesday, he took it a step further. Trump has claimed that all Muslims should be barred from the US. There certainly can be no way that Trump actually believes this should happen, is there? Please tell me that this campaign is a publicity stunt. This can’t be what our country is becoming. Trump is making the US more vulnerable — ISIS has a mentality that the West is greedy and evil and by wanting to shut out Muslims of our country entirely solely on the basis of religion, Trump is feeding right into that “us against them” ideology that will only fuel ISIS’ hatred towards us.

Many treat Trump’s remarks as outliers in the GOP field — and the extremity with which he is making these remarks certainly is an outlier — but Islamophobia has, alarmingly so, become commonplace among the Republican primary candidates.

In September, Marco Rubio was reportedly more concerned with allowing Syrian refugees who are Christian enter the US than Syrian refugees who are Muslim.

Ted Cruz stated after the Paris attacks, “President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America: it is nothing less than lunacy.”

Shortly after the Paris attacks, Jeb Bush called for preferential treatment of Christian refugees over Muslim refugees.

Ted Cruz and Rand Paul voted for a legislative amendment in the Senate last week that would halt immigration entirely from dozens of Muslim countries with terrorist networks.

The sad part is that these comments are not just off the cuff — a lot of what we’re seeing here is pandering to a large sect of the Republican Party, which, alarmingly, is absolutely Islamophobic. A YouGov survey conducted in November found that 40 percent of Americans think that Muslims should be tracked through a national governmental database. And in September, a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 56 percent of Americans believe that “the values of Islam are at odds with American values and ways of life.” This number was 47 percent in 2011.

I’ll echo the sentiment that Ryan Ashdown ‘16 expressed in his “Open Letter to a Syrian Refugee,” the people who are immigrating to our country are the people who are the greatest victims of ISIS. Not only is it absolutely inhumane to shut an entire group of people out of our nation solely based on religion, but it is dangerous to our national security.

The joke’s over, Mr. Trump.