Trump damns truth, goes full speed ahead
Midway through his hour-long address Monday, Donald Trump acknowledged the weirdness of this election season.
“You can say anything about anybody and their poll numbers go up,” Trump told what was billed as the largest crowd ever to gather at the Prairie Capital Convention Center. “If you try to hit your mother over the head with a hammer, your poll numbers go up.... This is a strange election, isn’t it?” Trump was referring to fellow frontrunner Ben Carson, whose stories of attacking his mother with a hammer and stabbing a childhood friend have been greeted with skepticism by the media, which The Donald insisted misrepresents things. He said that the media used camera angles to inflate the number of protesters outside the studio during his recent appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” He said this while standing in front of bleachers with no fewer than six African-Americans sitting where cameras trained on Trump would capture them, inflating the number of minorities in an overwhelmingly white audience.
Truth hasn’t mattered much so far in the Republican primary race. Carson and Trump are leading the pack both in polls and fibs, according to Politifact, which fact-checks statements by politicians and has determined that just 16 of 64 statements made by Trump are either mostly true or half true. Forty-eight ranged from mostly false to “pants on fire,” the rating reserved for the most outrageous lies. Carson was hardly better, with just four of 19 statements rated either true or half true. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and others with far better truth track records are trailing badly in polls.
With scores of signs in the crowd reading “The Silent Majority Stands With Trump” and Goldwater-esque statements from the candidate, there were echoes of Republicans past on Monday, often to the delight of a crowd looking for zingers. Trump promised that he would be unpredictable when sending troops overseas.
“I want to have leaders that are unpredictable,” Trump thundered. “I want to be unpredictable.”
If elected, Trump predicted, those holding Americans as hostages overseas would be so frightened that hostages would be freed before he took office.
“I am, by the way, the most militaristic person in this room,” Trump boasted. “I will build our military so strong and so powerful nobody’s going to mess with us. We’re not going to have to use it.”
No Trump speech would be complete without his take on Mexico and China, and there was plenty of that, with Trump promising to return jobs to the United States and repeating his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border, with Mexico paying construction costs. He did not detail how he would convince Mexico to pay up.
He called elected leaders stupid and incompetent. He promised to repeal and replace Obamacare without saying what he would put in its place. He praised Medicare and blasted the nuclear deal with Iran. He said that Hillary Clinton was the worst secretary of state in the nation’s history, but she might get out-worsted by John Kerry. He also said that Clinton is running because she doesn’t want to be indicted. He didn’t specify her crime.
“People are in jail right now for doing 5 percent of what she did, and the Democrats are not going to prosecute her,” Trump said. “Hillary’s running for a lot of reasons. One of them is because she wants to stay out of jail.”
He said he can’t understand why Saudi Arabia is an ally.
“Why is it we protect Saudi Arabia?” Trump asked. “We get nothing.”
Without help from anyone, Trump easily shouted down a handful of hecklers who were removed from the venue. The biggest gaffe came early when Trump asked whether the crowd loved Chicago. Boos and shouts of “no” seemed to take him by surprise, but he pressed forward, noting that Nabisco is moving from Chicago to Mexico.
“Love it (Chicago) or not, it’s ours,” Trump said. “It’s not another country. … They’re moving Ford to Mexico.”
Ford has announced plans to build an engine and transmission plant in Mexico, but said in June that it has no plans to close its plant in Chicago. In August, Ford started building pickup trucks in Ohio that were once manufactured in Mexico.
Lines formed outside the venue two hours before doors opened, and the rush for good seats was reminiscent of a festival-seating rock concert. Afterward, the crush of admirers against a barrier where Trump handed out autographs was more than six deep, with those in front appearing somewhat distressed as those behind pushed forward.
Not everyone stayed for the end. Fortyfive minutes into Trump’s unscripted-yetpredictable speech, folks started filtering toward exits, apparently having had their fill of sound bites in a speech that moved from topic to topic as quickly as a standup comedian changes subjects. It was not, to be sure, an exodus, but it was noticeable. And so they weren’t around to hear Trump say that the American dream is nearly dead, but he will resurrect it and make this country great again.
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].
