As he often does at rallies, Trump asked the crowd what should happen to Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who abandoned his post in Afghanistan in 2009, was held hostage and then rescued. Trump called Bergdahl “a dirty, rotten traitor.”
“What do we do with Sgt. Bergdahl, 50 years ago?” Trump asked, calling on an older man sitting near the front who stood and shaped his hand like a gun. “That’s right. Boom. Boom!… Boom, he’s gone. He’s gone!”
Reality
While the case is very complex it is unpresidential to dumb it down to , “man deserted, me execute.” For example Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was suffering from a mental illness and the military was already well aware of his condition when they deployed him.
Sgt. Bergdahl expected to face court-martial at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in August.
Trump again pounded the fear drum and lied about the number of refugees the United States is accepting from war-torn Syria.
Our president wants to take in 250,000 from Syria. I mean, think of it. 250,000 people. And we all have heart. And we all want people taken care of and all of that. But with the problems our country has, to take in 250,000 people — some of whom are going to have problems, big problems.
Reality
Taking in refugees escaping war is one of the single best things a humanitarian or Christian can do.
A 200,000 figure is an announcement in September by Secretary of State John Kerry that the United States was prepared to boost the number of total refugees accepted from around the world in fiscal 2016, from 70,000 to 85,000. Then, in 2017, Kerry said that 100,000 would be accepted.
That adds up to 185,000 over two years. But this would be the total number of refugees, not the number of refugees from Syria. As for Syria, Obama has only directed the United States to accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year.
During a speech at Decker Auditorium in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump said he would go after ISIS-controlled oil fields and “bomb the shit out of ’em,” to loud applause.
ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because they have certain oil camps, certain areas of oil that they took away. They have some in Syria, some in Iraq. I would bomb the shit out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers. That’s right. I’d blow up the pipes. … I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left. And you know what, you’ll get Exxon to come in there and in two months, you ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker, brand new — it’ll be beautiful.
Reality
To think that Presidents do not swear you would be [expletive deleted]-ing crazy, but they have a good sense to not do it in public.
Dumbing a complex situation like ISIS down into a simple catchphrase may play well to a riled up crowd, but we will never know how effective it will be until Trump becomes President and can take action. Except the military already analyzed his plan and found it to be [expletive deleted]. Whoops!
Donald Trump insisted on Thursday that the U.S. must keep wages low in order to compete with other countries, one day after he dug in on his assertion that “wages are too high” in America. Speaking to Fox News Trump said:
“Whether it’s taxes or wages, if they’re too high we’re not going to be able to compete with other countries.”
Trump first said he believes wages are “too high” during Tuesday night’s Republican debate, undercutting the populist tone Trump has struck on the campaign trail as he’s called for protecting U.S. manufacturing jobs from outsourcing and immigration.
Trump’s comments about wages being “too high” came in response to a debate question about raising the minimum wage, which Trump and other GOP candidates said they oppose.
Is anyone really surprised that a billionaire businessman wants to keep wages low?
According to the Pew Research Center, real wages are not at all high and instead have been stagnant for decades. This means we’ve seen bigger paychecks, but that paycheck goes far less than before when buying stuff.
GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump opened the 4th primetime GOP debate by suggesting that Americans’ wages are “too high” and that it’s part of a problem with the country’s competitiveness.
“Taxes too high, wages too high,” he said, responding to a question about New York state’s decision to raise the minimum wage for certain workers to $15. “We’re not going to be able to compete against the world.”
Trump rejected calls to raise the minimum wage. His rival for pole position in the Republican primary, Ben Carson, agreed.
“I would not raise it specifically because I’m interested in making sure that people are able to enter the job market and take advantage of opportunities,” he said.
Is anyone really surprised that a billionaire businessman wants to keep wages low?
According to the Pew Research Center, real wages are not at all high and instead have been stagnant for decades. This means we’ve seen bigger paychecks, but that paycheck goes far less than before when buying stuff.
Donald Trump defended his vision for immigration policy at the November 10th GOP debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin by alluding to a plan implemented by President Dwight Eisenhower’s that supposedly deported more than a million illegal immigrants during the 1950s.
Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. Moved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.
Trump did not mention the disparaging name of the program, which was called “Operation Wetback.” Under the program, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service removed undocumented Mexican immigrants from the Southwest and sent them back to Mexico.
The operation began in Texas in 1954 and was a “quasi-military operation of search and seizure of all unauthorized immigrants,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. The association, however, says it’s difficult to estimate how many people were actually forced to leave the country under the operation.
At the time, the government said it had deported as many as 1.3 million illegal immigrants, but analysts have said this number is exaggerated and some have said the total number of people deported was a gradual result of other programs.
It is believed, however, that Eisenhower’s operation was the opposite of humane. A story in the Washington Post says that Mexicans were dumped in hot, obscure destinations in Mexico “with few possessions and no way of getting home,” in order to discourage them from returning to the U.S.
As we pointed out in our policy review of Trump’s Immigration Reform, mass deportations would involve rounding up every undocumented person and forcibly removing them from the country. What Trump is advocating here, the forced removal of a portion of a population with the same national heritage from an area, already has a name, it’s called “ethnic cleansing” and it is not seen as a positive and moral thing. On top of the horrific crimes against humanity being proposed, what Trump also fails to mention here is the cost. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told lawmakers that it costs about $12,500 to deport one immigrant from the United States. Multiply that by 11.3 million, and you get $141.3 billion. Not great for the deficit, smaller government, or freedoms.
Donald Trump took credit for Ford Motor Co. deciding not to build new plants in Mexico. The only issue with that: Ford is going ahead with its plans to build south of the border.
Trump first retweeted a link to an article with the headline, “Trump successfully pressures Ford to move Mexican plant to Ohio.”
The article cited a CNNMoney report (with no link) that Ford is relocating its facility from Mexico to Youngstown, Ohio. However a spokeswoman for the company told The Washington Post that Ford does not have any plans for a plant in Youngstown.
In his perceived triumph, Trump took to Twitter to take sole credit for creating American jobs and looking out for the little guy.
Word is that Ford Motor, because of my constant badgering at packed events, is going to cancel their deal to go to Mexico and stay in U.S.
Trump then followed up with another grammatically incorrect tweet asking a rhetorical question, dismissed that question, and finally asking us to imagine a world where that rhetorical question could actually be factual:
Do you think I will get credit for keeping Ford in U.S. Who cares, my supporters know the truth. Think what can be done as president!
Ford never had plans to build a new plant in Ohio and Ford never changed their expansion plans to continue building a plant south of the border. Ford did have plans to shift assembly of some of their truck lines to their existing Avon Lake, Ohio plant. But that decision was made in 2011, a full 4 years before any candidate announced their intention to run for U.S. president.
As Northeast Ohio Media Group reported, the Donald Trump appears to have confused the automobile manufacturer’s expansion plan south of the border with the company’s decision to start production of medium-duty pickups that had previously been manufactured in Mexico. Production began four years after Ohio Gov. John Kasich, another presidential candidate, pushed tax incentives that included breaks for Ford’s plant in Avon Lake, Ohio, about 90 miles from Youngstown.
Donald Trump believes the world would be much better off if ruthless dictators like Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi were still in power.
“100%,” Trump replied when asked that question in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper that aired Sunday on “State of the Union.”
Trump said he believes Iraq and Libya, the respective countries of the since-deceased dictators, would be less fractured and promote a more stable Middle East if the two had not been forcefully pushed out of power. Hussein fell from power following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Gadhafi was ousted following violent civil strife in 2011 that ultimately drew a NATO-led military intervention.
“I mean, look at Libya. Look at Iraq. Iraq used to be no terrorists. He (Hussein) would kill the terrorists immediately, which is like now it’s the Harvard of terrorism,” Trump said. “If you look at Iraq from years ago, I’m not saying he was a nice guy, he was a horrible guy, but it was a lot better than it is right now. Right now, Iraq is a training ground for terrorists. Right now Libya, nobody even knows Libya, frankly there is no Iraq and there is no Libya. It’s all broken up. They have no control. Nobody knows what’s going on.”
Both Gadhafi and Hussein committed atrocities against their own people and were among the world’s worst human rights abusers. NATO decided to intervene in Libya as Gadhafi appeared poised to commit a genocidal-like massacre.
But Trump said human rights abuses continue to plague Libya and Iraq and claimed, “They’re worse than they ever were.”
“People are getting their heads chopped off, they’re being drowned. Right now, they are far worse than they were, ever, under Saddam Hussein or Gadhafi,” he said.
What Trump is praising Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi for here isn’t justice against the evil terrorists. Saddam Hussein used this tactic of labeling political dissenters and ethnic minorities as “terrorists” and disappearing them, many times without trial. This is a violation of human rights, crimes against humanity, and murder. Hussein’s atrocities are all documented at organizations like Human Rights Watch.
So this is what Trump is praising when comparing Hussein against our “weak” justice system. And if applied in the United States it would be a clear violation of the 5th and 14th amendments of the Constitution should it be applied here in the United States.
