Two years ago on Friday, Donald Trump took a ride down the escalator in Trump Tower and spent 45 minutes laying out his vision for the United States if he was, against all odds, elected President.
The Trump presidency is now here. The vision — not so much.
From the first moments of his long-shot campaign, Trump ran on one core idea: He was the ultimate outsider, the businessman who would cut through politics and political correctness to live up to his promises. One campaign and five presidential months later, Trump is already starting to look like the leader he swore he wouldn’t be.
His ad-libbed announcement was widely seen at the time as a joke or publicity stunt — with his remark calling Mexicans "rapists" stealing all the headlines — but it was also stunningly specific, unveiling a series of slogans and unheard-of vows that formed the bedrock of his campaign.
“I want to have the strongest military that we've ever had, and we need it more now than ever. But I said, 'Don't hit Iraq,' because you're going to totally destabilize the Middle East.”
Trump did indeed support President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and only started speaking out against it months after war began there. BuzzFeed News dug up a 2002 interview where Howard Stern asked Trump if he supported invading Iraq. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump said. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.” Even after this interview reemerged, Trump continued claiming through the entire campaign that he opposed the Iraq invasion from the start.
Full of nonsense is right. Trump’s statement was patently untrue at the time, with no evidence backing up his claim that unemployment numbers were up to four times greater than the government said. Even so, he would keep arguing through the campaign that Obama’s unemployment numbers — which reflected a struggling but rebounding economy — were simply not true. But less than two months into his presidency — when unemployment dipped by 0.1% — Trump suddenly decided the numbers were up to snuff. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Trump told him to deliver this message about the unemployment figures: “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”
“When was the last time you heard China is killing us? They're devaluing their currency to a level that you wouldn't believe. It makes it impossible for our companies to compete, impossible. They're killing us. But you don't hear that from anybody else. You don't hear it from anybody else.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/jfk-trump-camelot-scam-alot-gallery-1.3206554
Trump had been accusing China of being a currency manipulator even before he became a presidential candidate, and vowed to keep doing so in the White House. But in April, soon after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he told The Wall Street Journal, “They’re not currency manipulators," and he has since dropped the argument.
“Obamacare kicks in in 2016. Really big league. It is going to be amazingly destructive...We have to repeal Obamacare, and it can be — and — 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.”
Repeal and replace Obamacare — Trump seemed to say that nearly every day of his campaign, and he eventually said it would be one of his “first acts” as President. Two years and five White House months later, it still hasn’t happened. Not only is the Senate unlikely to pass the second version of the GOP’s much-maligned health care bill, but Trump himself turned against it this week, calling it “mean” a few weeks after praising it.
Russia claimed it had ‘derogatory’ intelligence on Trump
“We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’”
Trump did not write “The Art of the Deal,” the best-selling business book that bears his name is actually the work of co-credited ghostwriter Tony Schwartz. Schwartz grew horrified by Trump’s campaign and eventually spilled his behind-the-scenes horror stories to The New Yorker, in a profile where the ghostwriter said Trump’s election might lead to “the end of civilization.” In the story, Schwartz recalled being especially stunned when he heard Trump, in this speech, claim the book as his own. “If he could lie about that on Day One — when it was so easily refuted — he is likely to lie about anything,” Schwartz said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/randy-bryce-congress-campaign-announcementcampaign-2018/2017/06/21/3c161eca-5699-11e7-840b-512026319da7_video.html?utm_term=.0f06d2d6848c