On Friday’s Breitbart News Daily, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that he is the “messenger” for a movement that will continue long after the 2016 presidential campaign ends, regardless of its outcome.
In Trump’s view, the forgotten victims of a corrupt and foolish system fill the ranks of that movement – from the politically incorrect victims of illegal alien crime to workers displaced by open-borders immigration and trade policies, and taxpayers ripped off by wasteful and inept Big Government.
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“Well, Alex, it is a movement. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow. “We will have crowds of 20,000, 25,000 people routinely, in an area where she would go and have 300 people, 400 people, and can’t even fill up the seats. This is a movement like no other. I mean, Bill O’Reilly said it, and many others have said it. And these are people that don’t necessarily even like me. But O’Reilly said this is the single greatest political phenomena he’s ever seen in his lifetime, and he said that he’s seen a lot of them. He said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened, what’s taken over.’”
Trump took a humble view of his own role in the movement and spoke warmly of its members.
“I’m the messenger, believe me. I’m the messenger,” he said. “These are the forgotten people. These are great people. They shouldn’t be forgotten. These are great people. They’re brilliant people. They’re smart people. Really amazing people. They love the country. And they’ve totally been forgotten. I call them the Forgotten Man and Woman of this country. Their jobs have been taken away – violently, viciously, and, maybe most important, stupidly. They’ve been shipped down to Mexico. Their factories have been uprooted and moved to Mexico, where they hire Mexicans to do the work, and then the product comes nicely into our country – no tax, no nothing.”
“Well, that’s going to all change,” he promised. “You will see such change on that. It’s so easy to stop that from happening. But the politicians are all taken care of. First of all, in many cases, they’re not smart, but they’re all so taken care of by special interests that want this to happen because they have ownership interests and lots of other reasons for it to happen.”
“I have traveled around this country, and I have seen places that were vibrant 25 years ago,” Trump testified. “I’ve seen NAFTA. What NAFTA has done to our country is incredible. Probably 40 percent of our manufacturing jobs have been shipped to other places, and it’s only getting worse. And now they want to do TPP, which will be not as bad as NAFTA, but it’ll be very bad. It’ll be a continuation of the same.”
“Somehow they’ve agreed with my message,” Trump said of those forgotten American men and women. “I mean, that’s one of the messages. The borders are a message. You remember when I announced in Trump Tower, we talked about borders. We talked about people coming into the country. Well, I was right. People are coming into the country, and many of those people are violent. Violent. Whether it’s Kate Steinle, or Jamiel Shaw, or thousands of other people that are being just absolutely decimated by criminals that are pouring into the country, it is a very, very sad thing to see what’s happening. A very, very sad thing.”
“People see this, and then you have the military, which as you know is depleted. We want to build it back up, and I want to take care of the vets. And the Second Amendment, we have NRA total approval,” he said. “I think the biggest things are really the borders, the people coming in and the borders – we’re taking in Syrians now, by the thousands, and we have no idea who they are. Hillary Clinton wants to raise it by 550 percent, and we have no idea who these people are. They can’t vet them because they have no paperwork, no nothing. They could be ISIS, and it could be ISIS from within.”
Marlow proposed that the recent tightening in the polls was a result of Hillary Clinton getting into the news, and not in a good way, due to stories like the WikiLeaks email disclosures. The previous news cycles, by contrast, were dominated by what he described as “Donald Trump scandals, real or fabricated.”
“How do you keep her in the news for the next eleven days?” Marlow asked.
“Well, we’re doing our rallies. You’re seeing the crowds we’re getting. We’re getting twenty-five, thirty thousand people to a rally,” Trump replied. “And we’re doing our rallies, and doing a speech that very much, it’s not the same speech at all, it’s just a speech that very much talks about the same topics. Obamacare, which is a disaster, we’ve got to repeal or replace it. And we can do that with something so good.”
“Taxes, we talk about taxes are way too high. She’s giving a tax increase, we’re giving a tax decrease,” he continued. “We talk about regulations. We talk about the depleted military, and how we’re going to take care of the vets. We’re gonna really take care of our vets for the first time, maybe ever. And she can’t do that. She thinks the system is okay the way it is. So she’s got some really bad things. Saving our Second Amendment, which is so important; it’s under siege.”
Trump was highly optimistic about movement in the polls, declaring that during the past week, “we’re being thrust right into the lead of this election.”
“We had a poll which I think was a total phony poll, but last week we were 12 down with ABC, and they said they’ve never seen anything – now we’re three or four down, and we’re considered to be virtually tied,” he said. “I don’t believe the 12. I’m not sure I believe the three. You go to Florida, you see lines that are four blocks long. You’ve been hearing about it. In Florida, they’re voting, early voting, and the lines, they’re four blocks long. Look at North Carolina, look at Ohio, look what’s happening, the spirit and the love. And I think Pennsylvania’s gonna be a big surprise for people because I’m getting crowds in Pennsylvania like practically nowhere else.”
“So it is a movement, and it’s a movement like they’ve never seen in this country. I tell you what: it will be a really unified country if we win because we’re going to do the right thing,” he promised. “And if we lose, I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen. People are asking me that question. I just don’t know.”
Marlow asked Trump about the negative news coverage of Trump’s attendance at the grand opening of his new hotel in Washington, D.C. As Trump explained, he sees the hotel as a highly successful example of private construction that puts slow, bloated government projects to shame, and he believes his ability to execute such projects is an important part of his presidential resume.
He was not pleased to see most of the media either ignoring the hotel ceremony entirely or portraying the grand opening as Trump taking time away from his campaign to promote his personal business interests.
Trump told the tale in his inimitable style: “Amazing thing happened. I thought that it would be perfect timing. In fact, it just happened to be completed right before the election, and I said, ‘Wow, what timing. That’s a gift’ because we built it under budget and ahead of schedule, which is something the government never does. When they build a hospital, it’ll start off at $600 million. It costs $2 billion, okay? It’s horrible what goes on. I look at the numbers, and they build a highway, a road, a tunnel; it costs three, four times as much sometimes.
“So I said, you know, this is great, we have a building, it’s going to be one of the great hotels of the world, and one of the most beautiful buildings in the country, a landmark. Built in 1889, and it’s a landmark; it’s just an incredible building. So I said wow, this is great timing, you know, even for the campaign. And so we opened it, and all I heard – now you have to understand that I’ve been doing more campaigning probably, they say, than anybody maybe ever, in terms of presidential. From six in the morning till two in the morning, literally; I get in sometimes at two. Today, we’re going to Iowa, we’re going to Maine, Manchester, New Hampshire; we’re all over the place. All day long, it’s different places.
“So we came in from North Carolina, and we immediately left for Pennsylvania after the hotel. And they put out a narrative that Donald Trump takes time off from his campaign. Now, Hillary Clinton goes home, and stays there all day, and she’ll come out for one event, not even two events. I mean she really rarely does two events ’cause I don’t think she has the strength to do two events. But she’ll divert a little, by comparison. I’m not knocking it; I’m saying she’s got this machine behind her, the Democratic machine, that’s all it is, that’s what she’s got. And the media’s behind her so much.
“So she’ll do a very short session and go home and go to sleep. And they put out the narrative like I’m taking time off from the campaign. Actually, I viewed it differently. The ‘under budget, ahead of schedule’ was a very important thing for me to say. And importantly, my children were involved, and I wanted to honor my children because how could I have an opening of a massive hotel with thousands of employees – you know we had thousands of construction workers, everything – and how could I possibly do that when I’m opening this big building on Pennsylvania Avenue and not run in, run out, cut the ribbon, run in, run out, right?
“So I did that, and they made such a big deal over the fact that I was taking time off from the campaign – which, by the way, would have been about the first time in two months. I thought it was disgusting. I thought it was terrible. I honored my children. We honored the hotel itself. I mean, it’s a tremendous hotel. And we honored all the workers. I mean, even the workers there, we had tremendous numbers of workers and construction workers that built it over a two-year period, and even the workers there, it would have been very disrespectful if I didn’t show up.”
“So I thought it was a terrible thing, and you’re right, the Clinton News Network really built it up. It’s just amazing,” Trump concluded.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Listen to the full audio of Trump’s interview above.