MANCHESTER, N.H. – The policies promoted by each and every candidate for the Republican presidential nomination would, in effect, hand the U.S. over to billionaires. However, none of them explicitly say it.
None, that is, except one: Donald Trump.
Yesterday, at his last rally before the presidential primary elections here, Trump not only said it, he repeated and stressed it:
“I have lined up the richest, smartest people in the country. If I am elected President, they will negotiate for America.
“We have something very, very special,” he said. “We’re going to have a country that’s smart, that’s tough. I have the greatest dealmakers in the world. The richest men, the richest women, people who are truly successful in this country, but we don’t use ’em!”
Trump accurately listed many of the problems facing the American people: job loss and lack of job security; expensive health care and the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world.
Trump even railed against politicians “who work for billionaires” and who refuse to take any action that will hurt their donors.
Sounds like things Bernie Sanders is saying, right? Perhaps, but the solutions offered by Trump and Sanders could not be more different.
Sanders explains that the people in the U.S. have been suffering because the big banks and Wall Street have been sucking our economy dry. The answer: the people should organize and take back the government.
Trump says the nation’s problems stem from politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties being “incompetent” and “weak.”
Trump’s solution: turn the nation over to the “best negotiators in the world,” his billionaire buddies.
The crowd of about 3,000 at the rally yesterday cheered wildly.
Trump said that some of his friends “are nice people, some not so nice and some you wouldn’t want to have coffee with,” but they will “make America great again.”
He did not say how the billionaires he blamed for corrupting politicians would suddenly start to work for the people. However, he did say that one billionaire would do just that: him.
“I am entirely self-funded,” he said. “When I’m President and the special interests try to buy me, I will just say to them: ‘I don’t need your money.'” He did not promise, however, to put the interests of the people before his own interests as a business magnate.
Trump said that the American people “have started a movement. I am the form that movement has taken.”
Hitler and Mussolini both justified their actions by saying that they, themselves, embodied all the hopes and dreams of “the people.”
Both turned their nations over to the industrial and financial bosses who had devastated their economies in the first place.
Last night, Trump told several flat-out lies; lies that he repeats at every rally. The Nazis discovered that if you tell a big enough lie often enough, people will begin to believe it no matter how outrageous it is.
One of the participants in yesterday’s rally said he supports Trump because “He’s made a business, he can get things done like nobody else. He knows how to deal with ISIS, he’s going to shut down the border, ban all [immigrants] temporarily and make America great.”
The media paint Trump as a clown and a buffoon. In covering last night’s rally, they did it again. The headlines in the papers and the leads on TV and radio put the spotlight on the fact he encouraged the use of a misogynistic curse word to describe one of his Republican opponents.
Reporters did not report on what Trump said about his plans for America.
His followers, however, listen closely to what he says and are misled into supporting plans that would destroy American democracy.
Yesterday, as snow fell heavily outside the arena where the rally was taking place, Trump demanded that his followers get out and vote for him regardless of what disaster they may be facing.
“If you’re sick, if you’re close to death, if the doctors can’t do anything about it, your wife is disgusted with you and she’s leaving you… I don’t give a damn, you gotta get out to vote,” he yelled.
Today, many did just that.
Photo: Charles Krupa | AP
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