Tag: speech
In Trump's Latest 'Economic' Speech, He Said Little About Economy

In Trump's Latest 'Economic' Speech, He Said Little About Economy

On Thursday at an event billed by his campaign as a major rollout of his future economic plans, Donald Trump instead promoted conspiracy theories about Vice President Kamala Harris and immigrants. Trump also embraced harmful environmental policies and rehashed economic ideas that failed during his presidency.

“Kamala Harris is the first major party nominee in American history who fundamentally rejects freedom and embraces Marxism, communism, and fascism,” Trump said in a speech at a luncheon held at the Economic Club of New York.

“You’re learning about this—you’ll find out—nobody knew who she was, just a few months ago, they didn’t know who she was.”

Trump’s claim ignores the fact that Harris has been a public figure for over 20 years, serving as district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general for California, a U.S. senator, and as vice president for the last four years. Harris was certainly well-known enough to secure more than 81.2 million votes as part of the winning presidential ticket in 2020 alongside President Joe Biden.

Trump went on to attack Harris for the economic record of the Biden-Harris administration in an attempt to discount the economic improvements that have occurred since she was sworn in as vice president.

“100% of the net job creation in the past year has gone to illegal migrants,” Trump alleged. But this claim is based on Trump’s frequent habit of attacking migrants and blaming them for problems in the country.

The Associated Press recently fact checked a similar claim from Trump and noted that it was a “misinterpretation of government jobs data” with Trump conflating statistics of foreign-born workers to undocumented immigrants. In fact, using his own standard, Trump would have to count his wife, Melania, who is a naturalized immigrant from Yugoslavia, as supposedly “illegal.”

Trump’s running mate Gov. JD Vance also recently made this claim, which Politifact rated as “mostly false.” Vance’s source for the data was the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, which the nonpartisan Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.

Trump also used the speech to complain about his recent trial and conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, falsely blaming the prosecution on Harris and the Democratic Party.

“Under Kamala the United States is becoming a third-world banana republic, she and her party are censoring speech, weaponizing the justice system, and trying to throw their political opponents—me—in jail,” Trump said.

“They always have to remember that two can play the game.”

But it was a jury of ordinary citizens, not his political opponents, who judged that Trump had broken New York laws in using campaign funds to cover up his affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump’s complaint also ignores his frequent calls for his former political rival Hillary Clinton to be “locked up.”

When he did address his plans, Trump pushed to rescind the Biden administration’s policy to restrict drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, which is meant to protect 13 million acres and the diverse wildlife that inhabits the region.

Trump also called for a return to the tax cuts that passed during his administration, which were tilted in favor of the highest earners and multimillion dollar corporations. These cuts never delivered the economic growth he promised they would when he first campaigned for office, and instead generated trillions in debt and deficit for the U.S.

Trump also said he would appoint billionaire Elon Musk to lead a government efficiency commission. Musk has endorsed Trump’s campaign and repeatedly promoted racist conspiracies on X, the social media platform he purchased.

On economic issues, Trump has one of the worst presidential records. During his time in office, the U.S. economy lost 2.7 million jobs and the unemployment rate reached as high as 14.8% at the height of Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak in April 2020.

Since Harris took office alongside President Joe Biden in January 2021, the national unemployment rate has gone from 6.4% to 4.3% as of July. And 15 million jobs have been created since the Biden/Harris team took office.

Despite Trump’s claim that Harris is a Marxist and communist, business has boomed during the time she and Biden have been in office, with the stock market reaching record levels it never achieved under Trump.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Ronny Jackson

Flummoxed Wingnuts Insist Biden Was 'Jacked Up On Drugs' During Speech

President Joe Biden’s fiery Thursday night State of the Union speech was bad news for the preferred narrative from pro-Trump commentators that Biden is a dementia patient on the brink of death. So they responded by baselessly claiming he must have been on performance-enhancing drugs.

The right has sought to leverage Biden’s age, stutter, and well-known tendency to make verbal gaffes since his 2020 presidential campaign. Republican Party operatives promote out-of-context snippets featuring his miscues, which are then amplified by the right-wing media megaphone and leak into the mainstream press. Fox News and its rivals depict the president as an addled old man whose reelection campaign constitutes elder abuse.

That portrayal crashed and burned on Thursday night, with news outlets describing Biden as making “a forceful case” during a “feisty,” “scrappy,” “energetic” “stemwinder” that may have “reset the 2024 campaign.” As it became clear that no one would buy this speech as evidence that Biden is too old to be president, you could see the right settle in real time on an alternate, evidence-free narrative: Biden was on drugs.

Fox anchor Julie Banderas provided a case study in this progression. As Biden prepared to begin his speech at 9:21 p.m., she posted that she was watching the speech “from bed. Didn’t need to a take a Melatonin tonight, this should do it.” By 9:45 p.m., with her preferred narrative dead, she grasped for a new one and alleged that Biden was on cocaine: “I think I just got to the bottom of the untraceable little baggie found at the White House.”

Her right-wing allies quickly converged on the same narrative.

  • OutKick’s Clay Travis, 9:44 p.m.: “What drugs have they shot him up with tonight? This is not how normal people talk.”
  • Right-wing cartoonist Ben Garrison, 9:45 p.m.: “They really jacked up Joe with the drugs tonight- think there's a IV bag under his jacket?”
  • TownHall’s Kurt Schlicter, 9:49 p.m.: “Maybe the paramedic who called into @HughHewitt this morning and told me Biden would be on cocaine was right!”
  • Podcaster Monica Crowley, 9:53 p.m.: “Biden, pumped full of god-knows-what drugs to make it through this pack of lies, blasts Pharma.”
  • Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway, 9:54 p.m.: “Plot twist: It was Joe Biden's cocaine in the White House!”
  • RealClearInvestigations’ Mark Hemingway, 9:57 p.m.: “The rushed jittery pace of this speech is the drugs, right?”
  • Fox host Greg Gutfeld, 10 p.m.: “Think we found out who that coke belonged to.”

Donald Trump himself claimed Biden was in an altered state during the speech. “THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF!” he posted at 9:59 p.m.

Even Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), the former White House doctor whom the Navy demoted following an inspector general report finding he drank and took Ambien while on duty and whose medical operation reportedly functioned as a pill mill for Trump White House staffers, got into the act.

“Whatever they gave to Biden is wearing off! He is struggling big time! As I have been saying for years now, Joe Biden is NOT fit to be President!” he posted at 10:22 p.m.

Fox host and close Trump ally Sean Hannity took the narrative to the right-wing network in the 11 p.m. hour, trying to coin a new nickname for Biden: “Jacked-up Joe.”

“Everybody knew that Joe had a very big challenge coming into tonight because — and we’ll show tapes throughout the night of his cognitive decline,” he later explained. “Clearly, well, Jacked-up Joe perhaps overcompensated and I think that's being charitable.”

Hannity clearly thought this moniker was very clever: He and his guests described Biden as “jacked-up” at least 9 times over the course of the show.

This is what it looks like when the right is floundering for a response after one of its cherished talking points publicly implodes: They just start making stuff up. Reporters should keep that in mind in the future when assessing whether to treat right-wing claims about the president’s mental stamina with credulity.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Biden Delivers Stirring Message Of Solidarity With Ukraine To Congress

Biden Delivers Stirring Message Of Solidarity With Ukraine To Congress

Washington (AFP) - It was an address by a man who appears absolutely clear that his greatest strength is in bringing people together.

As US President Joe Biden took his place at the front of the House of Representatives for his first State of the Union speech, his most pressing concern was to bring the chamber to its feet in a poignant gesture of solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

"The Ukrainian ambassador to the United States is here tonight," the president said as he launched into the 60-minute address, acknowledging the guest of honor, diplomat Oksana Markarova.

"Let each of us here tonight in this chamber send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world. Please rise if you are able and show that, yes, we the United States of America stand with the Ukrainian people."

Tears in her eyes, Markarova struggled to compose herself in her spot alongside First Lady Jill Biden as lawmakers packed into the chamber for the annual keynote clapped and cheered with one voice.

Sixty minutes later, the call for unity ended as it had begun, with the president seeking to galvanize "the only nation on Earth that has always turned every crisis we have faced into an opportunity."

As Ukraine entered its seventh day under attack from Vladimir Putin's Russia, many of the lawmakers present echoed Biden's gesture, sporting the yellow and blue colors of the flag of America's embattled ally.

Biden was the ringmaster for numerous hearings of great import in that very building, a 19th century neoclassical shrine to Western liberal democracy at the east end of Washington's National Mall.

As he ran for president in 2020, the Democrat would often wax lyrical about his days in the Senate, talking up his record as a breaker of barriers and a reacher across the aisle.

But the avuncular grin dropped away as Biden assumed the role he is less known for: policeman, enforcer, the autocrat's worst nightmare.

"We are joining with our European allies to find and seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets," he said of Russia's corrupt billionaires.

"We are coming for your ill-begotten gains," he warned them, earning a rare round of approving claps from the Republican benches.

Togetherness

The rare show of togetherness over the Ukraine crisis may have left less cynical Congress watchers hopeful for a more unified, productive relationship between Democrats and Republicans in the future.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Genuine bipartisanship is something of a holy grail in deeply divided Washington, of course, and the wing of the opposition party loyal to Donald Trump for the most part could only blink, unmoved.

There are still no shortage of conservatives in Washington -- followers of the last White House occupant and more traditional establishment foreign policy hawks -- who call Biden "weak" on foreign rivals like China and Russia.

The administration needs to do much more, they argue, to secure US energy independence so that oil and gas-rich autocracies are unable to hold Americans to ransom.

Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, an unserious carnival barker to her critics but a darling of the far-right, eschewed the Ukrainian colors to turn up in midnight black shawl emblazoned with the pro-fossil fuel message "drill baby drill."

One of Biden's harshest critics on Tuesday though was not from the so-called MAGA caucus at all.

Ukrainian-born US representative Victoria Spartz, who was embraced by many of her colleagues as she entered the chamber Tuesday night, had made a speech a few hours earlier that would have made for difficult listening in the Oval Office.

Describing the plight of her 95-year-old grandmother, pinned down under the Russian aerial bombardment in northern Ukraine, Spartz accused Biden of doing nothing to help.

"It is not a war, it's a genocide because we have a crazy man that believes that he has the whole world hostage," she said of Putin.

"And now that we have a president that talks about, talks about -- and doesn't do things... Is he going to wait when millions die and then he's going to do more?"

A Trump Doctrine At Last?

A Trump Doctrine At Last?

There is a dog-walking-on-hind-legs peculiarity to watching Donald Trump give a scripted speech.

His foreign policy address to The National Interest on Wednesday was, of course, not his first; despite prior insistence that no presidential candidate should be allowed a teleprompter, he did so at AIPAC as well. This is done presumably in an effort at message discipline — and in part, it worked. After all, Trump didn’t advocate for torture or the killing of terrorists’ families! What a low bar this cycle has set.

Even so, the weirdness of a “more measured” Trump persists because even when moderated, he is not. There was so much that was so quintessentially Trump about this address even if the man who delivered it was pretending not to be him. Among a cacophony of contradictions, embellishments, and outright lies, Trump presented a disastrously incoherent worldview built on a foundation of empty promises.

First, a look at the contradictions—beginning with the kind of pedantic nitpicking that Trump so loathes from eggheads like myself. There is a distasteful irony in Trump’s christening his foreign policy approach as “America First” and immediately moving to praise U.S. leadership during World War II, given that the movement of the same name advocated fiercely for isolationism in advance of the same conflict. This is not to say that foreign policy doctrine names are ever good (remember Rubio’s capitalized yet shallow American Strength?), but is simply one piece of evidence among an ever-growing pile that Trump has little regard for history or context.

Trump’s discussion of allies was the most whiplash-inducing topic in the speech by far. In the space of just a few paragraphs, he advanced two propositions: one, that our allies are freeloaders greedily taking advantage of our money and security guarantees, and two, that these allies don’t feel like they can depend on us. These points are mutually exclusive. It is remarkable to hear promises of how America will “be a great and reliable ally again” from a man who questions the utility of NATO and thinks Japan and South Korea should just build their own nuclear weapons. Trump promised his administration would work with our Muslim allies in the Middle East to fight ISIS, yet gave no indication of how this would be achieved while he simultaneously banned them from immigrating or even traveling to our nation.

Trump also argued that the United States should stand by its commitments on the world stage — before insisting that we abdicate the Iran nuclear deal. To be fair to Trump, he qualified his statement with the word “friends,” perhaps in his mind exempting Iran (though still in contrast to the NATO and Asia points above). But to be fair to reality, Trump made a mockery of the facts around the deal. Iran has not ignored its terms, per the international organization monitoring their nuclear supply chain. The lines of communication established by its negotiations did facilitate the return of our Sailors. And of course, it does prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon through limits and verification — far more than bloviating from a podium does.

In fact, the Iran diatribe well illustrates that while contradictions are part of Trump’s brand, so is being wrong and misleading. Trump rants that we’re “Asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming,” when actually, they’re the ones asking us. He continues to insist that he was always “proudly against” the Iraq War, which has been proven demonstrably false with actual interview audio. Even the little things don’t escape outright fabrication: Trump rails against the disrespect of “nobody” greeting President Obama on the tarmac in Havana, when in fact Cuba’s foreign minister and others did so and the White House knew in advance that Raul Castro would not.

There are near-endless Trump tropes to unpack throughout the speech. He warned against “importing extremism through senseless immigration policies,” implicitly insisting that the exhaustive verification process we have does not exist, perhaps because he himself does not understand or know about it. And he bemoaned “people laughing at us” around the world—a theme that, along with his opinion that the United States should exact tribute in response for our efforts at global stability, is a surprisingly consistent piece of Trump’s worldview.

But perhaps the most Trumpian thing of all the Trumpian things about the speech was the incredible lack of how. Trump made promises that contradicted each other, sure, but also sweeping statements—ensuring ISIS “will be gone” the most spectacular among them—that simply had no follow through. When Trump was not criticizing others, he was simply offering an ever-increasing list of empty guarantees all rooted in the conviction that he, through means unexplained, could deliver on them. The most concrete policy proposal was calling for two already regularly-held summits—everything else would resolve itself by the sheer force of Trump.

Because this, truly, is the key to Trump’s worldview: he is the beginning, the end, and everything in between. The narcissism that leads to harmless if laughable idiosyncrasies like a gold-adorned 757 becomes something far more serious when applied to leading a nation and the world. It reared its ugly head in Trump’s opportunistic tweet following the Brussels attacks—“I alone can solve” the problem of terrorism, he claimed—but this speech was an outgrowth of the same sentiment in that it presented a worldview built on platitudes, distortions, and above all else, ego.

That—nothing more, and nothing less—is the true Trump foreign policy doctrine: Trump First, Trump Alone, and Never Mind You How.

Graham F. West manages The Whistlestop (@thewhistle_stop), a platform for holding candidates and elected officials accountable on issues of national security and foreign policy throughout the 2016 cycle. Views expressed are his own.

Photo: Still. The National Interest/ ABC 

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