By Stephen Macaulay
During the Donald Trump event in Philadelphia, where he was joined on stage by acolyte Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, clearly a woman who learned respectful public behavior from WWE divas (“And I know that you all embrace being the City of Brotherly Love, but I’m going to get real with you right here, Kamala Harris sucks. Right? She sucks.” Classy.), things got off on one of two left feet.
When Trump took the stage, Noem told him that the crowd loves him “because they recognize, sir, that you’re the one who fights for them. You’re the one who protects them.”
To which he responded, “And you know what else? They fight for themselves and they’ve been fighting for a long time, and we’re going to make your fight easier.”
Where is all of this fighting going on?
But because he got on the topic of fighting, he fairly quickly got to “the Afghanistan disaster, the most embarrassing time in the history of our country.”
As he probably doesn’t recall, in February 2020 Trump and the Taliban reached a deal, the Doha Agreement. It said that all US forces would withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021 and in return the Taliban wouldn’t attack American forces. Trump, perhaps, assumed, he’d still be in office. He wasn’t.
Oh, and there was another thing that Trump agreed to: Pressuring the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban military leaders and fighters from prison.
Perhaps this has something to do with his claims of other countries releasing criminals from prison that make their way to the US. Seems like he might be complicit in that if that is, indeed, occurring.
Biden pushed back on the May 1 deadline and things didn’t go well. On August 26, terrorists killed 13 US service members in Afghanistan and by August 30, the last U.S. military helicopter took off.
Certainly bad and bolloxed. But “the most embarrassing time in the history of our country”?
Noem then, presumably referring to Bagram Airfield, said, “And who controls that airstrip now?”
Trump answered: “China.”
And went on:
“A big one. A really good one. Powerful, runways, long runways. And you know what happened? I’ll tell you, they gave it up, and it was one hour way from where China … Forget about Afghanistan. One hour away from where China builds its nuclear weapons would have been very nice to have. And China now occupies that air base. So it’s terrible. It’s terrible.”
It is also untrue.
Noem decided to move things along. She opened up questioning from the audience.
She called on a man named Reid. Trump observed, “Nice looking guy.” Huh?
Noem said, “And Reid, I believe you’re a Navy SEAL, correct?”
That would have been a money shot, with a SEAL in the house.
Reid answered: “No.”
Noem: “No. Okay. I got that wrong. All right, thank you very much.”
She was probably still thinking about the Chinese.
Reid asked Trump about what he was going to do to reduce high mortgage rates to help make housing affordable.
Trump answered that “We had interest rates at 2%”—which he didn’t exactly, as the average interest rates from 2017 to 2019 were on the order of 4.5 to 5%--higher than the Obama 2013-2016 of 3.5 to 4.5%. While mortgage rates were below 3% in 2020-2021, that’s largely because the Fed, responding to COVID, cut the benchmark interest rate to near zero and purchased a lot of mortgage-backed securities.
So apparently the only way Trump pulled something off was due to a virus that killed 384,536 Americans in 2020 and 462,193 more in 2021.
He bounced around in that answer about mortgage rates to zoning, Venezuelan oil (would anyone want regulations to be lifted so an oil refinery could be built next door to someone’s house?), Social Security taxation, inflation (“In my opinion, the biggest inflation in the history of our country” — which it isn’t by a long shot, his opinion notwithstanding), to fake job statistics, fake crime statistics, then back to oil: “One year from January 20th, we will have your energy prices cut in half all over the country.” One assumes that the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips would probably resist that happening. You’d think that a man who went on to proclaim, “I went to school here. I went to the Wharton School, the great Wharton School of Finance, and they were great. It’s a great place. It’s a great place, but I went to college here.” would understand about supply and demand: anyone who is running a petroleum company isn’t going to let supply become so huge that its margins get halved.
He was asked about how he’d deal with inflation at the grocery store.
Trump, in part:
“Our farmers aren’t being treated properly, and we had a deal with China and it was a great deal. I never mentioned it because once COVID came in, I said that was a bridge too far because I had a great relationship with President Xi and he’s a fierce man and he’s a man that likes China and I understand that, but we had a deal and he was perfect on that deal. Fifty billion dollars he was going to buy. We were doing numbers like you wouldn’t believe for the farmer, but the farmers are very badly hurt. The farmers in this country, we’re going to get them straightened out. We’re going to get your prices down.”
As we’ve noted before, from the Peterson Institute for International Economics on Trump’s deal that Xi “was perfect on”: “In the end, China bought only 58 percent of the US exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, not even enough to reach its import levels from before the trade war. Put differently, China bought none of the additional $200 billion of exports Trump’s deal had promised.”
Quite a deal. The Chinese bought less than before he worked his deal.
And he’s going to straighten things out?
And there was more “weaving” performed by Trump. One person in the audience fainted about 40 minutes into the event. As the person was being treated, Trump said, “While we’re waiting, so we had a beautiful evening, and I don’t know if they could get this song up quickly, but if they could work really quickly backstage while we’re waiting, Ave Maria.” The song played.
And suddenly, it seems, an audio ear worm worked itself into his head.
Some eight minutes after the first person needed medical attention, a second fell and needed medical attention.
Trump said, “How about we’ll do a little music. Let’s make this a musical fest.”
One playing of Ave Maria wasn’t enough.
“So put on Pavarotti singing Ave Maria. Nice and loud. Turn it up louder. We want a little action here. Turn it up louder.”
Pavarotti or not, “We want a little action here” as a result of a performance of “Hail Mary”?
After that song Trump said, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
And so the crowd heard Time to Say Goodbye, YMCA!, Hallelujah, Nothing Compares 2 U, An American Trilogy, Rich Men North of Richmond, November Rain and Memory as Trump danced and swayed.
Lies and a lack of rhythm. That’s what qualifies him to be president?
Macaulay is pundit-at-large, writing primarily for the right column. Your comments, whether from the conservative or liberal perspective, are welcome in the COMMENTS section of either column, or via email at editors@thehustings.news.
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MONDAY 10/21/24