Donald Trump has something to say to Detroit autoworkers: you make too much money. Talking about U.S. vehicle manufacturers moving production to Mexico in an interview with The Detroit News, Trump said this:
He said U.S. automakers could shift production away from Michigan to communities where autoworkers would make less. “You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you’d do full-circle — you’ll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less,” Trump said. “We can do the rotation in the United States — it doesn’t have to be in Mexico.”He said that after Michigan “loses a couple of plants — all of sudden you’ll make good deals in your own area.”
Reality
Trump is, of course, dead wrong about this. The article goes on to say, “Although wages are lower at non-union U.S. plants owned by foreign automakers, hourly employees for Detroit’s Big Three are paid the same no matter what state they’re in, under the terms of United Auto Workers contracts.”
It’s not easy to put brash Donald Trump on the spot. But that’s exactly what a young woman did during an event in New Hampshire.
“So, maybe I’m wrong, maybe you can prove me wrong,” said Lauren Batchelder, a student at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “But I don’t think you’re a friend to women.”
It turns out she is a volunteer for the Jeb Bush campaign, though the Bush folks say she attended the event on her own accord. Some Trump supporters suggest the questioner was a plant from the Bush campaign where she has volunteered.
Reality
The Bush campaign says she was at the event on her own and the campaign did not “sanction” her question. That is plausible, but it is also just as plausible that she was a plant.
However that does not matter at all and it (obviously intentionally) redirects attention from the actual argument. Trump has made seriously sexist and misogynist comments over the course of his entire campaign. He is not a friend to women.
Trump said he backs government tax incentives to keep auto production in the United States. He said the U.S. shouldn’t open its market to Japanese imports unless it drops trade barriers.
The United States has lost more than 5 million factory jobs since 2000; Michigan has shed more than one-third of its manufacturing jobs since then. In an appeal to blue-collar workers, Trump vows to keep the more than 12 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
“We’ve got to keep (factories) here. It’s not that hard to do,” he said. Without action, he added, “pretty soon all we’re going to have is nursing home jobs.”
Trump has repeatedly said that if elected, he would not allow Ford to open a new plant in Mexico. At his campaign announcement speech in New York in June, Trump said he would call Fields to explain the “bad news.”
“Let me give you the bad news: Every car, every truck and every part manufactured in this plant that comes across the border, we’re going to charge you a 35 percent tax,” Trump said. “They are going to take away thousands of jobs.”
Ford confirmed that Fields sent Trump an email the day after his announcement speech. Spokesman Karl Henkel said: “Mark sent Mr. Trump an email with information about Ford, including the $6.2 billion we have invested in our U.S. plants since 2011 and our hiring of nearly 25,000 U.S. employees. Mr. Trump thanked us for the information and said that Ford is a great company and that he is a Ford customer. We appreciate his kind words.”
Trump said Fields’ email didn’t change his views about the expansion. He called it a “very, very nice letter,” but said it didn’t justify “how it is going to be good for the United States, because that cannot be justified.”
Reality
There is no legal avenue to single out one company for punitive taxes. The highlights Donald Trump’s lack of familiarity with United States laws.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump defended himself from the fierce backlash he’s received for criticizing Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly, insisting he said nothing wrong and that he values women.
“Who would say that?” Trump said Sunday. “Do you think I’d make a statement like that? Who would make a statement like that? Only a sick person would even think about that.”
He blamed his Republican presidential opponents for fanning the flames of controversy, and claimed he meant to refer to her “nose and/or ears” — not a woman’s period.
Reality
In the context of the conversation one can extrapolate that Donald Trump was implying Megyn Kelly was angry at him, coincidentally inventing a new idiom about blood and eyes. Regarding the “wherever”, men in the U.S. joke say that women who are menstruating are angrier or more aggressive than they usually are. It doesn’t take a genius to accept that Trump was speaking about Kelly’s lady bits.
He was still angry at Kelly later Friday, delivering bizarre comments on “CNN Tonight” with Don Lemon:
I am very disappointed in Fox News. I think they had an agenda.
I don’t have a lot of respect for Megyn Kelly, she came out, reading her script, trying to be tough and sharp. When you meet her you realize she is not very tough or very sharp. She is zippo.
When asked further about Kelly, who asked the billionaire developer about his previously disparaging comments about women, Trump said:
I just don’t respect her as a journalist. I don’t think she is very good. I think she is highly overrated.
Then went on to say:
You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.
Trump’s fury was sparked by Kelly’s opening question, asking if calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals” is behavior befitting a president.
Trump quipped that he had only called Rosie O’Donnell those names, but Kelly said he had bad mouthed other women “well beyond” the comedian.
At the first televised Republican debate, moderator Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his treatment of women, citing comments that he allegedly made about various women being “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”
Following the debate Trump slammed moderator Megyn Kelly on Twitter with a series of horrible tweets. The next day Trump told Good Morning America that he does not remember having said some of the comments disparaging women.
She came up with words that I don’t recognize. Some of the statements she made about the women, I don’t recognize those words whatsoever.
Either Donald Trump does not have the greatest memory ever (which would be a lie) or he is a liar for making his comment that he does not remember insulting women.
According to Vox, who researched and found every comment cited by Kelly was in fact made by Trump and outlined where each of the comments was made, many of the comments were made about Rosie O’Donnell.
Trump has had an issue with Kelly when she moderated the Republican presidential debate. He accused her of being unfairly harsh on him by asking him valid questions about past sexist and misogynist comments. Fox News stood up for its anchor, calling the attacks on her “sexist verbal assaults.”
Donald Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner and not exactly friend of women, was expected to say some confrontational things at the first Republican presidential debate.
But when his machismo went up against Megyn Kelly, the Fox News personality, debate moderator and nonstop voice for women’s issues, he didn’t stand a chance. In fact, Kelly spent most of the debate grilling Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and more candidates with surprisingly tough questions over reproductive rights and beyond.
“You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals,” Kelly began her question, about as directly as you can.
“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump interrupted with a sneer, earning cheers from the crowd.
Kelly wasn’t having it. Any of it.
“For the record, it was way beyond Rosie O’Donnell,” Kelly said – before launching into a laundry list Trump’s most misogynistic moments:
“Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on the Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president? And how do you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton – that you are part of the war on women?”
Trump, unchastened, responded with a misdirect: “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.”
Then he made a veiled threat at Kelly herself.
“What I say is what I say, and honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be based on the way you’ve treated me, but I wouldn’t do that.”
Donald Trump responded to a question about past sexist and misogynist comments and responded with… more sexist and misogynist comments.
To try to gauge how unpresidental that was, try to imagine your favorite president publicly making comments like:
I just spoke with that fat pig Angela Merkel and we’re going to open up trade talks.
So I want to thank that dog President Park Geun-hye for our shared commitment to promoting a more peaceful world. I wonder if Huckabee was right and she eats dogs?
Furthermore Trump hid behind political correctness in his attempt to redirect the conversation. See, he’s not an sexist for making those comments, you’re what is wrong with this country for being offended by his sexist comments. There are so many inherit logical flaws with this argument. Just to name a few:
Red herring fallacy when diverting away from answering sexist charges.
Straw man fallacy when blaming political correctness.
While Trump has bashed the H-1B visa program in multiple debates and makes lowering the number of H-1B visas a top policy decision for his immigration reform.
Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.
Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americans outside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need companies to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to the unemployment office, not USCIS.
Ut-Oh!
Not only was Donald Trump extensively using the H-1B visa program for his own companies, he tried to import at least 1,100 foreign workers, and he has been accused of fraud and treating models at his model agency “like a slave.”
After an editorial published by the Des Moins Register that criticized Trump for his comments about John McCain’s war record and called on Trump to quit the Republican race, the entire newspaper was barred from future Trump events.
Trump’s national campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told political columnist Kathie Obradovich in a phone call that the Register was being excluded from the event because of the editorial. “We’re not issuing credentials to anyone from The Des Moines Register based on the editorial that they wrote earlier in the week,” he said.
