Electoral battles

National security moves to the top of 2016 campaign

Six days before the crucial first presidential debate, Donald Trump is using a spate of bombings and stabbings to build an interlocking argument on two issues where he thinks tough talk gives him a winning hand -- immigration and terrorism.

The attacks over the weekend mercifully did not kill anybody -- but they inevitably put the fear of terrorism back at the center of the showdown between Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

From Trump's point of view, the new terror scares play directly into a vision of a nation under siege and which he must get Americans to buy into if he is to win in November."We cannot let this evil continue," Trump said in Florida on Monday after the capture of a US naturalized citizen of Afghan descent suspected of planting a series of bombs in New York and New Jersey over the weekend, and the stabbing of nine people in a separate attack in a Minnesota mall on Saturday in an attack claimed by ISIS. "If you chose Donald Trump, these problems are going to go away."