Repudiated across much of the political spectrum but defended on conservative talk radio, Donald J. Trump on Tuesday stood by his call to block all Muslims from entering the United States. He cast it as a temporary move in response to terrorism and invoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s authorization of the detention of Japanese, German and Italian immigrants during World War II as precedent.

Critics including both the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, a Republican, and the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat, assailed Mr. Trump’s proposal as self-defeating and un-American.

“Tell Donald Trump: Hate is not an American value,” Hillary Clinton wrote on Twitter. The “super PAC” supporting Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, unveiled its first ad attacking Mr. Trump, and the White House said Mr. Trump had disqualified himself from serving as president.

But the castigation was far from unanimous: Mr. Trump was applauded by some conservative commentators, who said he reflected the electorate’s views more honestly than the party’s leaders. “Anyone who thinks @realDonaldTrump comments will hurt him don’t know the temperature of the American ppl,” the radio host Laura Ingraham wrote on Twitter.

Senator Ted Cruz, who is vying for much the same base of support that Mr. Trump now enjoys, disavowed his proposal but pointedly declined to join in the scolding. “I commend Donald Trump for standing up and focusing America’s attention on the need to secure our borders,” Mr. Cruz said at the Capitol.

And former Senator Rick Santorum, the winner of the 2012 Iowa caucus, seemed to embrace Mr. Trump’s impulse but differed on the details. “I’ve proposed actual concrete things and immigration law that would have — not the effect of banning all Muslims, but a lot of them because we need to get rid of the visa lottery system, which is the way in which a lot of radicals have come into this country,” he said on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily.”

Mr. Trump, who has set the tone in a Republican presidential race he has led for months, defended and expanded upon his proposal in a string of television interviews Tuesday morning.

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Source: Maggie Habermann, http://www.nytimes.com