Trump: ‘Illegal immigrants are taken much better care of by this country than our veterans’
Donald Trump says people living in the United States illegally are being treated better than the nation’s military veterans.
“In many cases, illegal immigrants are taken much better care of by this country than our veterans,” Trump said at the annual Rolling Thunder rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where hundreds of thousands of bikers gathered to honor prisoners of war and service members missing in action. “We’re not going to allow that to happen any longer.”
“We’re gonna rebuild our military,” he continued. “And we’re gonna take care of our veterans. Our veterans have been treated so badly in this country.”
Trump — whose repeated assertions that his televised January fundraiser for veterans took in $6 million have been called into question in recent days — announced his campaign would be holding a press conference on Tuesday to disclose where, specifically, the donations went.
Before the event, political observers wondered how the crowd would react to Trump in light of his controversial comments about Arizona Sen. John McCain, a former POW who Trump suggested is only considered a war hero because he was caught. But the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was, for the most part, warmly received.
“Do we love the bikers? Yes!” Trump said. “Some of these people are tough. And some of these guys, they’re rough. And I get out and I shake their hands, and I’ll tell you, there is love. There is love, and it’s an incredible feeling. And that’s why I wanted to be here today.”
The billionaire real estate mogul reiterated his campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border — “a real wall,” he said — and have Mexico pay for it.
“Not even a doubt,” he said.
Near the end of a characteristically rambling 20-minute address, Trump said he thought the crowd would be similar in size to the one that listened to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 — “where people would be lined up from here all the way to the Washington Monument” — but was disappointed by the turnout.
The size-conscious candidate blamed security, claiming he saw “hundreds of thousands of people all along the highways” who weren’t able to get into the event.
“We have by far the biggest rallies, far bigger than Bernie Sanders’,” Trump said. “But they don’t talk about it. I had a rally where we had 18,000 people, Bernie had seven [thousand]. With my rally, they said, ‘Donald Trump made a speech today, bah-bah-bah.‘ That was it. With Bernie’s rally, same time, they said, ‘Bernie Sanders had a tremendous crowd of 7,000.’ I said, ‘I had 11,000 people more than he did!’ They don’t mention it. And they won’t mention the kinds of massive crowds we have here today.”
