Declaring to be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” billionaire Donald Trump entered the Republican presidential contest today as its 12th candidate.
Trump went way off script for the long announcement in New York, starting off with a dig at Rick Perry’s sweaty airplane hangar announcement.
“Some of the candidates, they went in. They didn’t know the air-conditioner didn’t work. They sweated like dogs… How are they going to beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s gonna happen,” he said.
Mexico, he said, is “laughing at us, at our stupidity” as they import drugs and “rapists” into the United States. “And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump added, vowing to build a wall on the southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
“Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East. They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them. They just built a hotel in Syria. Can you believe this? They built a hotel. When I have to build a hotel, I pay interest. They don’t have to pay interest, because they took the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should’ve taken,” he said, referring to the hotel ISIS refurbished and opened in Mosul.
Trump called the other Republicans in the very wide field “wonderful people.”
“They all want me to support them. They don’t know how to bring it about. They come up to my office. I’m meeting with three of them in the next week. And they don’t know — ‘Are you running? Are you not running? Could we have your support? What do we do? How do we do it?’ I like them. And I hear their speeches. And they don’t talk jobs and they don’t talk China,” he said.
“We have to repeal Obamacare, and it can be replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government. And we can do it.”
Trump said when Obama was elected he thought the young president “would be a great cheerleader.”
“But he wasn’t a cheerleader. He’s actually a negative force. He’s been a negative force. He wasn’t a cheerleader; he was the opposite,” he added.
Some of his platform points?
- “Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people, but we have people that are stupid.”
- “I like China. I sell apartments for — I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them? … But their leaders are much smarter than our leaders, and we can’t sustain ourself with that.”
- “I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich. And by the way, I’m not even saying that in a — that’s the kind of mindset, that’s the kind of thinking you need for this country.”
He advocated sending “real junk” military aid, since the U.S. is “always losing this gorgeous brand-new stuff” to groups like ISIS.
To fight ISIS, he vowed to “find the General Patton or I will find General MacArthur, I will find the right guy. I will find the guy that’s going to take that military and make it really work. Nobody, nobody will be pushing us around.”
“I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. And we won’t be using a man like Secretary Kerry that has absolutely no concept of negotiation, who’s making a horrible and laughable deal, who’s just being tapped along as they make weapons right now, and then goes into a bicycle race at 72 years old, and falls and breaks his leg. I won’t be doing that. And I promise I will never be in a bicycle race. That I can tell you.”
Trump also took a swipe at Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “Then I looked at Rubio. He was unable to answer the question, is Iraq a good thing or bad thing? He didn’t know. He couldn’t answer the question,” he said. “How are these people gonna lead us? How are we gonna — how are we gonna go back and make it great again? We can’t. They don’t have a clue. They can’t lead us. They can’t. They can’t even answer simple questions. It was terrible.”
He also slammed Jeb Bush: “Bush is totally in favor of Common Core. I don’t see how he can possibly get the nomination. He’s weak on immigration. He’s in favor of Common Core. How the hell can you vote for this guy? You just can’t do it.”
“…This is going to be an election, in my opinion, that’s based on competence,” because “people are tired of these nice people.”
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