- April 19, 2015 -
Trump: ‘We’ll Make America Great Again’
There were 25 potential Republican candidates for president in Nashua this weekend and one of them, businessman Donald Trump, made time to meet with Republican activists and all kinds of media outlets, from national news networks to local cable access channels.
In a one-on-one with Patch on April 18, 2015, Trump shared some of his initiatives if he decides to mount a bid for president. He was asked about his timeline for an official announcement, the pre-retirement concerns Generation Xers are facing as well as employment problems Millennials are having, income inequality, potential cabinet positions if elected, taxes, and more.
Trump said he’ll be making a decision to run soon on whether he would be a New Hampshire first-in-the-nation Primary candidate and when he does, “we’re going to be surprising a lot of people.” He said that so far, the crowd response has been great, adding that he believed he was receiving more standing ovations at speeches than most of the other candidates.
The basic theme of a potential campaign will be to return the country to its previous greatness whether it is leading the world from a position of strength when negotiating with countries like Iran to getting tough with nations that are taking advantage of bad trade deals.
Trump said the world was “laughing” at President Barack Obama and taking advantage of the current malaise in the nation. He said he would combat currency manipulation that was making it “impossible for our companies to compete” overseas while at the same time, taking action against those nations that refused to play fair on the world stage. Trump said he would implement taxes (tariffs) on nations that refused to allow American products to be exported into their countries.
“I guarantee you,” he said. “We will win every one of those negotiations.”
China, he said, was the biggest culprit, “stripping us dry.” Trump said the world’s largest nation needed to be taken on. He used Apple as an example saying that most people thought it was an American company but 90 percent of its products were made overseas.
Trump, unlike all the other Republican and Democratic candidates, said the only way to prosperity for American workers, including the vast separation of wealth between the ultra rich and the middle-class, was to re-industrialize the nation.
“We have to bring the jobs back,” he said. “When we bring the jobs back, you’re going to start with the income inequality and start knocking it out … but until you do that, it’s not going to happen.”
Another issue separating him from other GOP candidates was his insistence on preserving Social Security and Medicare. Everyone else in the Republican field, he said, wants to cut it.
“I’m saying, ‘We’re not doing that,’” he said.
He added that the people who are getting hurt the worst right now were frugal citizens who saved their money and worked hard but now, find themselves earning as little as 1 percent on money that they need to grow in order to survive in retirement.
“You can’t live on it … it’s really unfair,” he said.
Part of the preservation of Social Security strategy is to also get young people who are paying into the system, who will also need it later when they retire, work that they can survive on. He said it wasn’t that long ago when the country had millions and millions decent wage manufacturing jobs that have now fled overseas due to bad trade deals like NAFTA. Trump also warned that Mexico was becoming just as big a danger as China.
“We’re going to bring back real jobs into the United States like it used to be, when we were great,” he said. “My theme is Make America Great Again … a couple of politicians have copied it; I think they’ll un-copy it. But for three years I’ve been saying, make America great again. Sadly, I have to add the word ‘again.’ But that’s what it’s all about.”
