Mexican Rapists, Voter Fraud, People Being “Cut Up“: Trump’s “Tax Reform” Speech Goes Slightly Off the Rails
If you took a gander at Donald Trump’s schedule on Thursday, you would have seen that he was slated, in theory, to attend a “roundtable discussion on tax reform” in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. In practice, that didn’t actually happen. Oh, the president made it to the town of 2,444 and sat on the panel, flanked by Representative Evan Jenkins and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. But because he doesn’t have control of the words that come out of his mouth, and because the electric cattle prod John Kelly probably wanted to use to keep him in line was out of range, the event became less about the tax legislation passed in December and more about every deranged, fact-free thought that passed through the 45th president’s brain.
From the get-go, it was clear Trump wasn’t even going to pretend to give the affair a patina of order, literally throwing his prepared talking points into the air and telling the crowd, “You know, this was going to be my remarks. It would’ve taken about two minutes, but to hell with it. That would have been a little boring, a little boring.”
With that out of the way, he launched into a rant riddled with “alternative facts” about immigrants, voter fraud, rape, and MS-13, telling the audience, among other things . . .
That the haters and losers who criticized him for calling Mexicans “rapists” as he announced his candidacy were so, so wrong, and he was so, so right. “Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower, when I opened?” he asked. “Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough.’ I used the word ‘rape.’ And yesterday it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.” Trump was seemingly referring to a group of Central-American migrants traveling through Mexico to the U.S. border. As The Washington Post notes, it’s completely unclear how Trump arrived at the conclusion that a rape epidemic is taking place, given that “the only mentions of rape with regard to the caravan in recent days . . . refer to criminal behavior that the migrants have been trying to escape in their home countries or along the route.”)
That the visa lottery program hurts the U.S. because other countries aren’t “putting their good ones” into it, echoing the line from his 2015 Trump Tower speech about Mexico not “sending its best people” to the U.S.
That MS-13 is terrorizing towns on Long Island, which are “being taken over by thugs” who “cut people up” with knives “because a bullet is too quick,” and they want to “inflict [maximum] pain on their victims.” On the bright side, he boasted that ICE agents are yanking people “by the neck” and “throwing” them into “the paddy wagon,” an Irish-American slur and a term not used in earnest since roughly the 1800s. The ratings for these scenes, Trump claimed, are huge. “The people are clapping and screaming,” he said. “Their town’s been liberated . . . literally . . . a war . . . they’re clapping.”
That his voter-fraud conspiracy is not a conspiracy. “In many places, like California,” Trump explained, “The same person votes many times. You probably heard about that. They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s a conspiracy theory!’ Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people, and it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”
That the guy responsible for last year‘s West Side Highway terror attack brought 22 people into the country with him through “chain migration”, a delusion that no one, not even his aides, believes.
Elsewhere in fictitious, wildly off-topic statements, Trump told the audience that the U.S. has a $500 billion trade deficit with China (it’s actually $337 billion); that Democrats bring violent immigrants into the country so they’ll vote for them; that car companies didn’t build plants in America for decades before he became president; and that sanctuary cities are “basically . . . to protect a lot of people that are bad people. Really bad.”
Either because a broken clock is right twice a day, or because, with all that rattling going on in his brain, a loose piece was momentarily knocked back into place, the president did touch on tax reform a few times. Unsurprisingly, though, most of the statements were all-out lies, the most egregious of which was the claim that until he came up with the genius idea to call it tax reform, tax cuts had not passed for 40 years. (For the record, Trump wanted to call the bill the “The Cut Cut Cut Act,” and Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and a little-known figure named Ronald Reagan all passed tax cuts). Afterward, he turned things over to the panelists, who showered him with praise for being so much better to work with than his predecessor, and for doing so much for their state.
To recap, the “tax-reform” event involved: lies about immigrants, lies about voter fraud, lies about trade, and a line here or two—also fictional!—about taxes. It’s a real shocker that Republicans are worried about the midterms and whatever they’re supposed to be running on.
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