The Donald is now a Presidential candidate.
His speech was beyond the capable of fact checking. But now, in Trump, the Liars' Game, we all get to try.
Each of these statements has six possibilies:
1) True
2) Ignorant -- The statement is false, but the Donald was unaware of the true facts.
3) Figurative -- The Donald was exaggerating, or saying something not literally true, but not expected to believed; rather used to make a point.
4) Stupid -- The Donald knows the facts and inexplicably believes that it adds up to what he said, because he's too dumb to know it does not.
5) Lying -- The Donald knew the true facts, but his statement serves his purposes better.
6) Gibberish -- The statement is word salad; neither true nor false.
Statements from The Donald's Presidential Announcement.
You pick from the choices above. No winners. Losers think most of the statements are true:
1) Last quarter, it was just announced, our gross domestic product - a sign of strength, right? But not for us.
It was below zero. Who ever heard of this? It’s never below zero.
2) Our labor participation rate was the worst since 1978.
3) But think of it, GDP below zero, horrible labor participation rate, and our real unemployment is anywhere from 18-20%. Don’t believe the 5.6. Don’t believe it.
4) That’s right - a lot of people up there can’t get jobs. They can’t get jobs because there are no jobs because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs. They all have our jobs. But the real number, the real number, is anywhere from 18-19 and maybe even 21% and nobody talks about it because it’s a statistic that’s full of nonsense.
5) Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the day and we as a country are getting weaker.
6) We have a disaster called the big lie - Obamacare, Obamacare.
Yesterday it came out that costs are going, for people, up 39, 39, 49 and even 55%. And deductibles are through the roof. You have to get hit by a tractor, literally a tractor, to use it because the deductibles are so high it’s virtually useless. It’s a disaster.
7) And remember the $5 billion website, 5 billion we spent on a website, and to this day it doesn’t work. A $5 billion dollar website. I have so many websites. I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a website. It costs me $3.
$5 billion dollar website.
8) I’ve been on the circuit making speeches and I hear my fellow Republicans and they’re wonderful people. I like them. 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?
And I like them. I hear their speeches. And they don’t talk jobs. They don’t talk China. When was the last time you heard ‘China’s 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.
9) They’re killing us, but you don’t hear that from anyone else. You don’t hear that from anybody else. And I watch the speeches. I watch the speeches and they say ‘the sun will rise. The moon will set. All sorts of wonderful things will happen.’
And the people are saying ‘What’s going on? I just want a job. I don’t need the rhetoric, I just want a job.'
10) Obamacare kicks in in 2016, really bigly. It is going to be amazingly destructive. Doctors are quitting.
I have a friend who’s a doctor and he said to me the other day: ‘Donald, I never saw anything like it. I have more accountants than I have nurses. It’s a disaster. My patients are besides themselves. They had a plan that was good. They had a plan. They have no plan now.’
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.
11) Hey, I have lobbyists. I have to tell you, I have lobbyists that can produce anything for me. They’re great. But you know what? It won’t happen. It won’t happen because we have to stop doing things for some people, but for our country it’s destroying this country.
12) We need a leader that wrote the Art of the Deal. We need a leader that can bring back our jobs, can bring back our manufacturing, can bring back our military, can take care of our vets - our vets have been abandoned. And we also need a cheerleader.
13) You know, when President Obama was elected I said ‘Well, the one thing I think he’ll do well - I think he’ll be a great cheerleader for the country. I think he’d be a great spirit. He was vibrant. He was young. I really thought he would be a great cheerleader.
14) I will tell you, I love my life. I have a wonderful family. They’re saying, ‘Dad, you’re going to do something that’s so tough.’ You know, all of my life I’ve heard that a truly successful person, a really, really successful person - and even modestly successful - cannot run for public office. Just can’t happen.
15) I will be the greatest jobs president that god ever created, I tell you that. I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll bring back our money.
16) I’m going to tell you a couple of stories about trade, because I’m totally against the trade bill for a number of reasons.
Number one: the people negotiating it don’t have a clue. Our president doesn’t have a clue. He’s a bad negotiator. He’s the one that did Bergdahl. We get Bergdahl, they get five killer terrorists that everybody wanted over there. We get Bergdahl. We get a traitor. We get a no-good traitor and they get the five people that they wanted for years. And those people are now back on the battlefield trying to kill us. That’s the negotiator we have.
17) Hey, I’m not saying they’re stupid. I like China. I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them?
I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building at 1290 Avenue of Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable. I love China.
The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower.
I love China. People say, ‘Oh, you don’t like China.’ No, I love them, but their leaders are much smarter than our leaders. And we can’t sustain ourselves with that.
18) There’s too much - it’s like, it’s like take the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school football team. That’s the difference between China’s leaders and our leaders.
They are ripping us. We are rebuilding China. We are rebuilding many countries.
China, you got there now - roads, bridges, schools. You never saw anything like it. They have bridges that make the George Washington Bridge look like small potatoes.
And they’re all over the place. We have all the cards, but we don’t know how to use them. We don’t even know that we have the cards, because our leaders don’t understand the game.
We would turn off that spigot by charging them tax until they behave properly.
19) So I announced that I’m running for President. I would, one of the early things I would do, probably before I even got in, and I wouldn’t even use - you know, I know the smartest negotiators in the world.
I know the good ones, I know the bad ones, I know the overrated ones. You’ve got a lot that are overrated. They get good stories because the newspapers get buffaloed. But they’re not good.
But I know the best negotiators in the world and I’d put them one for each country. Believe me folks, we will do very, very well. Very, very well.
20) We’ve got $18 trillion in debt, we’ve got nothing but problems. We’ve got a military that needs equipment all over the place. We’ve got nuclear weapons that are obsolete. We’ve got nothing.
21) We’ve got social security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all. I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.
22) I’ll give you another example: Saudi Arabia. They make a billion dollars a day, a billion dollars a day.
I love the Saudis, many are in this building. They make a billion dollars a day. Whenever they have problems, we send over the ships. We send, we’re going to protect - what are we doing? They got nothing but money.
If the right person asked them, they’d pay a fortune. They wouldn’t be there except
for us.
23) And I’m the one that made all of the right predictions about Iraq. You know, all of these politicians that I’m running against now, it’s so nice to say I’m running as opposed to if I run, if I run - I’m running.
How are these people going to lead us? How are we going to go back and made it great again? We can’t. They don’t have a clue. They can’t lead us. They can’t.
24) Somebody said to me the other day, a reporter, very nice reporter - ‘But Mr. Trump, you’re not a nice person.’ But actually, I am. I think I’m a nice person. Does my family like me? I think so. Look at my family.
25) But we’re becoming a third-world country because of our infrastructure, our airports, our roads, everything.
26) And I have assets, big accounting firm - one of the most highly respected - $9,240,000,000. And I have liabilities of about $500 - that’s long-term debt, very low interest rates.
27) In fact, one of the big banks came to me, said, ‘Donald, you don’t have enough borrowing, can we loan you $4 billion.”
I said ‘I don’t need it. I don’t want it. I’ve been there. I don’t want it.”
But in two seconds, they give me whatever I wanted. So I have a total net worth, and now with the increase, it’ll be well-over $10 billion. But here, a total net worth of — net worth, not assets, not — a net worth, after all debt, after all expenses, the greatest assets — Trump Tower, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Bank of America building in San Francisco, 40 Wall Street, sometimes referred to as the Trump building right opposite the New York — many other places all over the world.
28) So the total is $8,737,540,000.
29) Now I’m not doing that, I’m not doing that to brag, because you know what? I don’t have to brag. I don’t have to, believe it or not.
30) We have losers. We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain.
31) I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.
32) Mark my words. Nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump. Nobody.
33) 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.
33) I promise I will never be in a bicycle race. That I can tell you.
34) End, end Common Core. Common Core should, it is a disaster. Bush is totally in favor of Common Core.
35) Rebuild the country’s infrastructure. Nobody can do that like me. Believe me. It will be done on time, on budget, way below cost, way below what anyone ever thought.
I look at the roads being built all over the country, and I say I can build those things for one-third. What they do is unbelievable, how bad.
36) Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts. Have to do it.
* * *
You save it by making the United States, by making us rich again, by taking back all of the money that’s being lost.
37) Sadly, the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.
38) Thank you. Thank you very much.