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Ex-Pres. Of Mexico Tells Trump: ‘I’m Not Gonna Pay For That F***ing Wall!’

Ex-Pres. Of Mexico Tells Trump: ‘I’m Not Gonna Pay For That F***ing Wall!’

Donald Trump’s plan to build a massive wall along the U.S.-Mexican border — and to make Mexico pay for it — has now gotten former Mexican President Vicente Fox telling everyone what he really thinks.

“I declare, I’m not gonna pay for that f***ing wall,” said Fox, who previously led Mexico’s conservative National Action Party, in an interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos. “He should pay for it — he’s got the money.”

“Are you afraid that he’s gonna be the next president of the United States?” Ramos asked. “What would that mean for Mexico?”

“No, no,” Fox replied. “Democracy cannot take us to crazy people that doesn’t know what’s going on in the world today.”

The two then discussed Trump’s latest victory in the Nevada Republican caucuses, in which the entrance poll indicated that Trump won a strong plurality of even Latino GOP voters.

“Forty-four percent of Hispanics — I’d like to know who those Hispanics are?” Fox said. “Because they — again, they’re followers of a false prophet. And he’s gonna take them to the desert. And if they think that they would benefit with an administration led by Donald Trump, they’re wrong.”

Fox implored the Latino voters in the United States to stop Trump: “They must open their eyes. Please, you Hispanics, Latins, in U.S., open your eyes. It’s not defend our race; it’s not to defend our creed. It’s to defend this very same nation that is hosting you — this nation is going to fail if to goes into the hands of a crazy guy.”

“What is Trump?” he further asked. “He’s not a Republican — absolutely not. Those are not the Republican principles. He is not a Democrat. He’s just himself — he’s egocentric.”

Update: Donald Trump has responded with outrage — that someone else is using profanity in this political debate!

The 2016 Campaign Joke That’s No Longer Funny — Just Violent

The 2016 Campaign Joke That’s No Longer Funny — Just Violent

Let’s be honest: We’ve all been kind of enjoying watching Donald Trump, even if the prospect of him becoming the next president makes many of us shudder in horror.

But as he continues to lead in national polls, Trump’s campaign is giving us all another reason to pause: As of late, physical violence has been following the candidate on the campaign trail, and leaving those who dare challenge his offensive remarks and policy positions shaken up at best, banged up and bruised at worst. The common thread among those attacked by Trump’s goons (both hired and not): They’re all Latino men.

On Thursday, while Donald Trump was signing a GOP loyalty oath, promising to back the winning Republican presidential nominee and not run as an independent should he lose the party’s nomination, one of his security guards ripped a sign away from protesters outside Trump Tower in New York City and then hit a protester in the face after the man attempted to retrieve the sign.

The large blue banner read, “Make America Racist Again,” a play on Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

In news video footage, the protester who was hit, Efraín Galicia, is seen chasing after the security guard. As Galicia attempts to take back the sign, the guard turns and hits him in the face.

“These men are acting just like their boss, Donald Trump, pushing Jorge Ramos from Univision out,” Galicia said of the guards. “This man thinks he can do whatever he wants in this country, and we’re going to stop him.”

“The Trump campaign said that the security team member on Thursday was ‘jumped from behind’ and that the campaign would ‘likely be pressing charges,'” The New York Timesreports.

This week’s strong-arming follows an August incident in which journalist Jorge Ramos was physically removed from a Trump campaign event by a security guard — who appears to be the same man who struck the protester outside Trump Tower.

When Ramos attempted to ask Trump a question about immigration, without being acknowledged to speak by The Donald, Trump told him to sit down and “Go back to Univision.” Later, Trump said he was not a bully, and Ramos “was totally out of line.”

In the most physically violent example of what Trump and his campaign have wrought, two of the candidate’s supporters in Boston allegedly beat and urinated on a homeless Latino man, after which one of the attackers reportedly told police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”

The survivor of the assault, a 58-year-old man who had been sleeping on the street, had his nose broken and chest and arms beaten by the suspects, two brothers who were leaving a Boston Red Sox game.

Adding insult to significant physical injury, Trump’s immediate comment on the attack was callous and cruel. The Boston Globereports:

Trump, told of the alleged assault, said “it would be a shame … I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

Later, he tempered his original statement, claiming on Twitter that he “would never condone violence.”

He “would never condone violence,” Trumps says, but he would, and has, proposed deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, stripping citizenship rights from the American children of undocumented immigrants, and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to keep out immigrants, refugees, and political asylum seekers fleeing poverty and violence in their countries. He has also said he would bomb nations in the Middle East and take their oil by military force. But, again, he “would never condone violence.”

While Trump himself has not put his hands on anyone, his rhetoric against undocumented immigrants, his choice of words, which dehumanizes Latino immigrants as “illegals,” and his responses to the violent altercations occurring in his name make him responsible.

What began as comical media fodder that has kept us smiling in disgust during the start of the long 2016 presidential campaign season has devolved into violent hate with bodily consequences. And with five months to go until the GOP primaries begin, Americans should be worried about how politics, sometimes described as the civilized exertion of power, is turning into a blood sport.

We need to stop chuckling and start fighting the urge to watch Trump. It may be the only way to resist his brand of violence.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reacts as he speaks at the 2015 FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Nevada, July 11, 2015. REUTERS/L.E. Baskow/Las Vegas Sun

Ramos 1, Trump Zee-ro

Ramos 1, Trump Zee-ro

I am so tired of the media tap dance around Donald Trump.

Earlier this week in Iowa, Univision journalist Jorge Ramos — regularly acknowledged by mainstream media as the Walter Cronkite of Latino America — was first ejected from a Trump news conference and then allowed to return to continue a heated exchange with Trump over immigration.

Ramos was trying to get Trump to explain how he would deport 11 million immigrants and build a wall along 1,900 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. Ramos was insistent. He was not waiting his turn. You could even say he was rude, an accusation that veteran journalists brag about as a badge of honor, particularly when it comes from politicians.

Trump offered no policy details beyond bragging that if he can build a 94-story building, he surely can build a fence. He told Ramos to “go back to Univision” and assured him, “I have a bigger heart than you do.”

May I just remind everyone that this man thinks he should be our president?

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the hosts and panel of journalists declared Ramos rude and grandstanding. They accused other journalists who covered the encounter as overreacting and overreaching.

Not one word of criticism for Trump. Now why would that be?

I offer this recent observation from Adweek‘s Mark Joyella:

“Fortunately for Morning Joe, talk of Donald Trump and the intensifying presidential campaign has helped the show hit a ratings milestone. A review of Nielsen ratings data shows for the first time in 2015, Morning Joe beat CNN’s New Day in the critical 25-54 demo for five consecutive weekdays.”

Hmm.

Here’s a secret most newspapers won’t tell you: The page views on their websites are skyrocketing because of Trump. This would be great, I guess, if print journalism had figured out how to monetize Web traffic. Oh well.

Trump is entertaining if you can ignore that he wants to be leader of the free world. He’s funny if you think racism and misogyny are great punchlines. If you’re not on board with that, you may think Trump deserves the toughest of questions, the ones Ramos wants to ask.

“He has to explain how he wants to deport 11 million people,” Ramos told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos after his Trump kerfuffle. “Can you imagine? How’s he going to do that? Is he going to put people in stadiums? We have to denounce that he wants to deny citizenship to children being born here. They’re citizens just like his, and it is impossible to build a 1,900-mile wall between Mexico and the United States, so that’s the kind of questions that I was asking Mr. Trump, and obviously he didn’t give any answers.”

The nerve of this man.

Also this week, Trump offered this explanation for why he wants to end birthright citizenship for children born to immigrant mothers who are here illegally:

“A woman’s getting ready to have a baby. She crosses the border for one day (and) has the baby. All of a sudden, for the next 80 years, we have to take care of” the child.

So-o-o-.

At the moment when most women (let’s call them white) can barely move and are bracing for the physical trauma of childbirth, Trump thinks Mexican women will undertake long treks fraught with danger so they can wobble across the U.S. border to drop babies — who will then spend their entire lives on the dole.

That there is a twofer.

His depiction of Mexican mothers as conniving women is a continuation of the misogyny he’s been directing at Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly ever since she dared to ask him why he calls women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”

His statement also echoes the racism he has displayed throughout his campaign, starting in June when he described Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.

For this, Washington Post fact finder Michelle Ye Hee Lee awarded him four Pinocchios:

Trump’s repeated statements about immigrants and crime underscore a common public perception that crime is correlated with immigration, especially illegal immigration. But that is a misperception; no solid data support it, and the data that do exist negate it. Trump can defend himself all he wants, but the facts just are not there.

Trump also claimed this week — my, his mouth has been busy — that gangs of immigrants who are here illegally are taking over St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri, as well as Baltimore and Chicago.

Modeling for journalists far and wide, Ferguson mayor James Knowles called him out on the lie.

“I’m assuming that Donald Trump’s saying that from his extensive experience here in St. Louis or in Ferguson,” he told KTVI-TV. “He’s never been here, as far as I know, and I’ve never seen any roving bands of illegal immigrants or gangs in Ferguson. I think he’s just trying to find headlines, and we just gave him one.”

Why, Mr. Mayor, how incredibly rude.

Connie Schultz is a a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Jorge Ramos, via Facebook.

Trump Defends Removal Of Univision Anchor From News Conference

Trump Defends Removal Of Univision Anchor From News Conference

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday defended his decision to toss a news anchor with the Spanish-language Univision network out of a press conference, in his latest tussle with a U.S. television personality.

“I’m not a bully,” Trump told NBC in an interview.

On Tuesday, Univision’s Jorge Ramos was removed from Trump’s news conference in Dubuque, Iowa, after the business mogul-turned-candidate said the journalist was asking a question out of turn.

“He was totally out of line last night,” Trump said of Ramos, speaking on NBC’s “Today” program.

Ramos, who has been critical of Trump’s stance on immigration, said he was waiting for his turn to ask a question on the subject when Trump ordered him out.

“He didn’t like my question and when he didn’t like my question then he motioned so the one security guard would come where I was and then threw me out of the press conference,” Ramos told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The dust-up is the latest involving a television anchor and the outspoken Trump, who also has faced criticism for his war-of-words with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly following that network’s recent Republican presidential debate.

Trump is locked in a legal battle with Univision over the network’s recent decision to cancel its contract to broadcast the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, co-owned by Trump, after he made controversial remarks about Latino immigrants.

Ramos has been equally vocal about Trump’s stance on immigration, telling CNN earlier this month that it was “not only disgraceful but dangerous” and fueling some criticism about his work as an objective journalist.

“He has to explain how he wants to deport 11 million people,” Ramos told ABC on Wednesday. “As journalists, we are not only required but we are forced to take a stand and clearly when Mr. Trump is talking about immigration in an extreme way, we have to confront him.”

Trump has called for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, deporting illegal immigrants and ending birthright citizenship.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Paul Simao)

Photo: Univision reporter Jorge Ramos (L) is escorted from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s news conference before his “Make America Great Again Rally” at the Grand River Center in Dubuque, Iowa, Tuesday, August 25, 2015. REUTERS/Ben Brewer