“When I watch to see what’s happening,” Donald Trump said Tuesday with uncharacteristic understatement, “it’s very, very sad. I mean, our country is being destroyed by these people. The border is a disaster. We [are] no longer respected. They don’t respect our leader at all. They don’t respect Biden at all.” Trump did not, however, simply assess our current predicament; he also offered hope for the future: “It’s so sad to see what’s happened to our great USA. But we can come back. I think these midterms are vital, just vital.” And even beyond the midterms, Trump detailed how the devastation that Biden’s handlers have wrought upon the country can be turned around if the Left’s stranglehold on power can be broken
“The system,” Trump noted, “is totally broken. Our system is broken. And we’re going into socialism. And we’re going into communism.” But if patriotic America-First politicians regain control, the economy can be righted, primarily by tackling inflation: “We have to straighten out inflation, which we can do much easier than people know,” Trump said, explaining that if energy costs were lowered, the rest would follow: “If energy comes down, it’s so important. Other parts of inflation are coming down too. I was saying today, ‘I read where food is going to make energy look like it’s a good deal, that the food prices are going to go up much more very soon, much more than the energy prices.’” But if American energy independence were restored, the beneficial effect would reverberate through the entire economy.
As for the free-for-all at the border, Trump says (of course) that it must end: “We have to immediately seal up the border.” Appropriate deportations must follow: “And we have to get a lot of the people out because many of these people came from prisons in these countries.” Trump noted that Biden’s open border was attracting people from all over the world: “It’s no longer just those few countries, including Mexico that I talk about all the time. It’s now like 140 countries. Some people said they didn’t know there were that many. They’re just flooding in. And they’re almost all letting their prisoners out into the United States. Why wouldn’t they? It’s very expensive, keeping prisoners, and they don’t want them anyway.”
The migrants’ countries of origin, said Trump, must be made to cooperate: “We’re taking them out by the thousands, bringing them back to their countries. “Their countries said no. I said, ‘That’s OK. We’re not going to pay the country anymore. We’re not going to pay you the hundreds of millions.’ Then they said, ‘Yes, absolutely. We’d love to take them back.” Of course they would.
Trump also repeated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t have happened on his watch: “I spoke to Putin about it. I know Putin very well. I spoke to him about a lot of things. And I spoke to him about Ukraine, because I know he wanted it. But he knew he could not do it. Not with me.” Trump opined that Putin was emboldened by Biden’s handlers’ catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan: “I think what happened, he was on the border, he had 200,000 people, and he was negotiating. He was going to make a good deal. And then he saw what happened in Afghanistan. And he said, ‘Man, these guys are incompetent. Let’s go in.’ And he didn’t know the force that he’d be met with.”
But what to do now? Trump suggested that NATO could expand the scope of its operations to counter China, noting that in pressuring NATO countries to pay more for their own defense, he had revitalized the organization: “Well, I think this NATO maybe should be involved. I’m the best thing that ever happened to NATO, because I made them pay. So NATO has plenty of money now.”
Will Trump run for president again in 2024? He said: “I want to look at what’s happening” after the midterms. “And then we’re going to be doing something else.” But the situation now, he pointed out, is quite dire: “We don’t have a free press. We really don’t have free speech anymore. It’s very bad, very dangerous. These elections are going to be absolutely critical for this country.” Indeed they are.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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