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Trump Blames 9/11 on Bush
Bloomberg Television interviewed Donald Trump today and he had tough words for Osama bin Laden Mohammed Atta Al Qaeda George W. Bush.
Anchor Stephanie Ruhle asked The Donald if voters could trust him to keep America safe and if he would provide the “comforter-in-chief” role as Bush did after 9/11 and Obama after the Sandy Hook shooting. I’ll let the Daily Mail take it from here:
“OK, I think I have a bigger heart than all of them,” he said. “I think I’m much more competent than all of them.”
“When you talk about George Bush – I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.”
Ruhle jumped in, saying, “Hold on! You can’t blame George Bush for that.”
“He was president, okay?” Trump responded. “Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
First, American presidents don’t “reign” and it’s alarming that a presidential frontrunner believes they do. Second, can we leave the “blame America first” nonsense to the Democrats? We don’t need two parties running down the country.
Oh, but he wasn’t done…
“If you look at Sandy Hook, those people are still begging for help. It’s a disaster, and it’s a disaster all over the place.”
“Government has proven to be a disaster during the Obama administration,” Trump pivoted. ‘What we need is a leader, we don’t have a leader.”
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT was the site of a horrific mass shooting. Hurricane Sandy was a large storm that struck the east coast. The two are unrelated — except in The Donald’s mind.
Dear fellow Republicans: The Trump circus continues only as long as you let it.
Published in General
*headdesk*
With the top-level politicians, it’s never their critics who bring them down, it’s themselves. It’s the unforced errors, not the unpopular policies, that do them in. See: Nixon, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton. I’m not gonna jump the gun and this is it for Trump, but when he goes down, it will be something like this.
(facepalm)
Watch Trump’s polls mysteriously inflate as the 9/11 truthers start artificially bombarding online polls for him.
The man literally has no shame. For the first time in my life I am embarrassed to be a conservative Republican because of the possibility of being associated with this man.
It only makes sense he’d say this about Bush. After all, McCain is a loser because he was captured and tortured.
Well, Trump blamed Bush for being president when 9/11 happened — that much is clearly in the transcript. He didn’t say that it was a controlled demolition AND done by the government — so we have that much to be thankful for.
If there are presidential actions or lack of actions to blame in this it is clearly Clinton’s fault more than Bush’s — that’s a slam dunk and it is surely how the history books will show it in a few years. How easy it is to see that if one looks at the record.
So I guess if we elect a competent leader like Donald Trump, we practically have a guarantee that there won’t be any disasters while he is in office. That’s some heck of a campaign promise.
Consistent though. That has essentially been his campaign theme for awhile now.
Come to think of it, our current president promised to stop the rise of the oceans and I believe he has succeeded.
“Very, very stupid people.” For those keeping score, that’s one “very” stupider than “very stupid.” Says the person who conflates the site of a school shooting with a cyclonic storm.
Is that #Winning in the Charlie Sheen sense of the word? And is that a clue that Charlie might be Donald’s running mate? Because, in that case, I might have to reconsider my opposition to Trump.
Presidents do not reign? You sure about that? Has anybody told the current POTUS? From where I am in the cheap seats it looks like a lot of reigning going on.
Isn’t this what a lot of libertarians, including the Paul family, argues? If the US just minded its own business, the rest of the world would just leave us alone? Doesn’t the charming Paul family believe the US brought WW II on itself, as well?
I disagree with Trump, just pointing out the selectively of the critique.
Wow, Larry. Yes! Thank you.
Trump’s level of ignorance about the terrorist attacks in September 2001 is staggering.
The Left will have a field day with these remarks.
John Bolton would put him in his place.
Grrrrr.
Trump is simply argumentative. That’s all he is. There’s not much more to him than that.
All we have is a circus and you are just arguing about who will be the chief clown. It would be a better use of time to craft explanations of why nothing can be done with whatever political power Republicans retain.
Wow that’s the most damning observation I’ve seen about Trump.
He thinks if we just had smarter people we could solve all the problems. Talk about utopian! Sounds like a Class-A meddler.
[edit] If I am not mistaken, this Knowledge problem was the subject of a book by economist Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (discussed briefly in a recent thread).
So, 10 or 15 point rise in Trump’s polls, whaddya think?
But, to play devil’s advocate, CEOs of companies are held accountable for all the stuff that isn’t their fault, and CEO is the model Trump is using for this whole POTUS thing.
So, I figure Trump thinks of the country as a big company for which he is auditioning, and that does tell us something about how he’ll run things when he is inevitably President.
Yes, the president has some of the blame for things that happen on his watch but for the first few months we have to blame the previous president. This is how boards of directors think, too. They do not blame the new guy for things that CLEARLY had roots in the previous administration and were due to a dereliction of duty of that previous president (or CEO).
9/11 happened 7-1/2 months into Bush’s administration and most, if not all, the lack of protection and lack of intelligence has to be blamed on Clinton — the man who gave us a nuclear North Korea.
I think you are right and that is why he fundamentally misunderstands constitutional government. Being President is not analogous to being CEO. It’s why anyone who seriously thinks we’ve gone astray from the constitutional scheme is going to be driven crazy if he becomes President.
Rand Paul:
– “I mean, there are times….leading up to World War II we cut off trade with Japan. That probably caused Japan to react angrily. We also had a blockade on Germany after World War I, which may have encouraged them, some of their anger.”
– “And the 9/11 Commission was a bipartisan commission. It was by no means any kind of partisan statement, but they readily admit that the main reason the terrorists say they came here is because we’re over there, because we have bases in their land and they don’t like it.”
Donald Trump is a creep who should not be president. Rand Paul is a creep who should not be a US Senator, let alone the president.
I loved the “blame him” or “don’t blame him” part. For somebody who styles himself as the anti-politician, he sure is beginning to sound like one.
Clinton never stopped Air Force missions over northern Iraq. He never stopped the UN sanctions against Iraq. He joined the United Nations in the 1,400 resolutions demanding inspections of Iraq’s weapons facilities. He never negotiated a peace treaty with Iraq.
I think he mistrusted Iraq every bit as much as Bush 41 and 43 did. I think Hillary knew the real story and that was why she voted for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
If you could plot the events leading up to the 2003 Shock and Awe, you would see a continuous line that started with Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait through GW’s invasion in 2003. That line goes solidly through both of Clinton’s terms.
If Clinton had had a third term, it would have probably looked just like the first two years of GW’s.
Silly me. I always thought George Bush was president on 9/11.
Apparently not. So who was, exactly? At what desk did the buck stop at that day?
Now I must add that I believe most of the blame lies with Clinton, for reasons everyone knows, at least here.
Yet I have grown to be profoundly infuriated with the endless buck-passing, excuse-mongering denial I see from the Republican party and its establishment.
9/11 happened while Bush was president. Yes, it did. He failed to stop it. He then failed to make a case that Bill Clinton and his party bore great responsibility for it, and in fact the democrats had successfully managed to impede Bush administration efforts to do more to prevent it. He failed to argue against the political correctness that had stopped the government from tearing apart Zacharious Moussoui’s laptop to garner every tiny morsel of information it contained. He then allowed Jamie Gorelick to end up on the 9/11 commission, somehow, instead of ending up in prison, failing to make any sort of case against her at all.
Bottom line: He failed.
Stop pretending otherwise. Stop. Just stop.
Can anyone spell Perot?
1) Would anyone like to compare and contrast Perot and Trump?
2) And, given that BHO has come close to destroying our constitutional republic with his pen, do you think that if Trump were president it would be all right for him to skirt the Constitution – to get things done, damn it – tho in the name of conservatism (notwithstanding the fact that I don’t believe him to be a conservative)?
(My thinking: If Trump did do that, you can kiss the Republic goodbye.)
I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an anti-politician office-seeker. The moment he begins seeking the job, he becomes a politician. He is subject to all the same desires and motivations and potential corrupting forces as those who have been in the business for years. And presidential politics is a heady business that can corrupt particularly quickly.
Only difference is that, for those who have been in it for years, we can to some degree judge their ability to resist those corrupting forces and evaluate how they handle that pressure.
I wonder if I’ll get as bored with winning as I already am with empty braggadocio.
I’m biding time waiting for the playoff game to start, so I stopped on CNN and Trump is speaking, and all he has talked about for the 10-15 minutes I’ve been watching is the various poll numbers. I guess he could do this for hours, no substance.