Donald Trump
At an appearance by Donald Trump this week, all of the veterans present supported him, MSNBC reported, showing one man saying, “He tells it like it is.” The veterans forgave Trump for remarking that Sen. John McCain wasn’t a war hero, saying that was just politicians sniping at each other, the TV interviewer reported.
Birds of a feather Tweet together
Here is a sprinkling of the Tweets sent by veterans after Trump made the remark:
“John McCain sold out Conservatives. I don’t give a crap if Donald Trump slams him and I’m a veteran.”
“As a Veteran I still love Trump. Tells it like it is. McCain went at him first.”
ved 20 years in the Army. Trump is hitting the target. McCain has hurt the military badly by cutting benefits.”
John McCain
To be sure, many veterans’ Tweets were critical of Trump.
In San Clemente, Cal., a man told a pollster who asked why he liked Trump, “He’s got some backbone.”
In 2008, when Trump threatened to run for president, my next-door neighbor, who leaned liberal on most issues, said after Trump bloviated about how he’d straighten out China, “He’ll show ’em.”
Trump fever
Such is the fantasy world that a significant segment of the American population lives in. Trump was the leading Republican presidential candidate this week with 24 percent favoring him, almost double his closest competitor, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who polled at 13 percent.
Scott Walker
Leonard Pitts
Here’s what syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts wrote Sunday about how this phenomenon reflects the mindset of the Republican Party today: “It, or at least, a significant fraction of it, continues to embrace a politics of bigotry and resentment, an estrangement from objective reality and a belief that the simplest, most simple-minded solution shouted in the loudest voice equals wisdom.”
The “bigotry” referred to the Donald’s remarks that many of the immigrants from Mexico were “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.”
Immigrants most law-abiding
The Wall Street Journal reported, “numerous studies going back more than a century have shown that immigrants—regardless of nationality or legal status—are less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes or to be incarcerated. A new report from the Immigration Policy Center notes that while the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. more than tripled between 1990 and 2013 to more than 11.2 million, ‘FBI data indicate that the violent crime rate declined 48%—which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41%, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary.’” The conservative newspaper quoted from a 2007 report showing that “for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants. This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented population.”
The Journal said a 2008 report found that immigrants in the California prison system were disproportionately low. The study found that incarceration rate for foreign-born adults was 297 per 100,000 of the state’s population, compared with 813 per 100,000 for U.S.-born adults. Quoting the study, the paper said: “The foreign-born, who make up roughly 35% of California’s adult population, constitute 17% of the state prison population.”
The paper continued: “High-profile incidents, like the recent arrest of a Mexican national in the horrific shooting death of a young woman in San Francisco, can give the impression that immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes. But the alleged killer is no more representative of Mexican immigrants than Dylann Roof (the alleged shooter in the South Carolina black-church massacre) is representative of white people.”
It ain’t necessarily so.
Charles Laughton
Trump tells it like it is? Try this on for size: Trump tells it like it isn’t. He calls to mind Charles Laughton in the 1957 film Witness to the Prosecution, when he thundered: “Are you not in fact a chronic and habitual liar?”
At Trump’s opening campaign appearance in New York, he walked into the room and declared, “This is some group of people. Thousands.” A reporter on the scene estimated the Trump supporters at a couple of hundred, plus another about 100 media persons. An online reporter observed of the campaign, “fittingly, it also began with a bald lie.”
Another online site, The Daily Banter, said, “Donald Trump’s speech announcing his 2016 campaign at the Trump Tower in New York City yesterday was a spectacle that will go down in American history. The billionaire real estate mogul wasted no time laying out his case to become President that included calling Mexican immigrants rapists, claiming God created him to create jobs, and using his knowledge of air conditioning units to create a military strategy against ISIS.”
Trumped up remarks
The fact-checking organization Politifact has found 14 statements by Trump, most of the ones investigated, to be false. Others were mostly false. Here’s a sampling:
Donald Trump
Donald Trump
DONALD TRUMP
President Obama
Lindsey Graham
President Obama called Trump “a carnival barker.” The Des Moines Register, in calling on him to drop out of the presidential race, labeled him a “blowhard.”
But Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina Trump-ed them all.
Trump, he said, is a “jackass.”
Now that’s telling it like it is.
