A poem about a snake, the dynamic between an electric boat and a shark, and a teleprompter provider were among the issues address by Donald Trump at a Las Vegas rally Sunday. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Policy, politics and progressive commentary
“Virtually 100 percent of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that? A hundred percent.”
That was one of the false claims Donald Trump asserted during an address in Las Vegas Sunday that was predominantly about immigration but that veered wildly in multiple directions, including insulting his teleprompter provider, mulling the prospect of being killed by an electric boat as opposed to a being killed by a shark, and reading a poem about a snake.
To reiterate, his claim is false. One hundred percent of new jobs created during the Biden administration were not taken by migrants who crossed the U.S. border illegally, for a lot of reasons, not least being that it would be statistically impossible.
The White House likes to say that 15 million jobs have been created since Biden became president. But 9 million of those were jobs that had been lost during the pandemic and came back. An argument can be made that policies enacted by Biden and congressional Democrats were crucial to bringing those jobs back, especially as quickly as it was done. But let’s play a Trump-friendly devil’s advocate and say the administration can only claim 6 million new jobs have been created under Biden’s watch.
About 2.5 million migrants who crossed the U.S. border illegally were released into the U.S under the Biden administration. Perhaps another estimated 1.6 million “gotaways” got into the U.S. by circumventing the authorities, potentially bringing the total to a little more than 4 million, including children.
That’s more than the number who entered the U.S. while Trump was president. But not enough to fill 6 million jobs – new jobs, by the way, that were spread broadly across several employment sectors, including hundreds of thousands of professional and technical positions, many of which would require accepted certifications that would make hiring of undocumented workers highly unlikely.
Here are some of the other false, curious, or just weird things Trump said in Las Vegas Sunday, in no particular order:
On the Nevada Republican U.S. Senate Primary. Trump has not endorsed in the contest featuring Sam Brown and Jeff Gunter, and Trump didn’t endorse either candidate on Sunday. But one of his random, scattered rants about his teleprompter not working properly reminded him of a faulty teleprompter during an Ohio rally earlier this year. That train of thought in turn led him to swerve into noting his endorsed candidate U.S. Senate in Ohio (Bernie Moreno) will be facing “a senator named Brown” (incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown).
“You have a man named Brown right here, you know. Very good,” Trump said, without clarifying who that “man named Brown right here” was, or if he had a first name, or why Trump had mentioned him.
On wage growth for Black workers. Under the Biden administration, “Real wages of African Americans and the workers of all over the world that came here legally – they’re down six percent,” Trump said. Trump’s impression that the Middle Passage was a form of legal immigration aside, his assertion about real wages, to borrow a phrase Trump led his crowd to chant on more than one occasion Sunday, is “bullshit.”
Historically disadvantaged groups are disproportionately employed in low-wage jobs. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute analysis of wage and census data, real wages – that is, adjusted for inflation – among low-income workers were 12% percent higher in 2023 than they were in 2019.
“Black men, young workers, and working mothers experienced particularly fast wage growth over the last four years,” the report found.
The Economist (far from a wild-eyed leftist publication) concluded in a separate analysis of federal data earlier this year that “median earnings for Black workers were about 84% of those of white Americans at the end of 2023” – further progress needs to be achieved, obviously – but that is “a sharp rise from the 79% average of the preceding two decades.”
On “suckers” and “losers.” Trump is very mad at Joe Biden, who often notes that Trump in 2018 reportedly skipped visiting a cemetery where more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers who died in World War I are buried, and referred to the deceased Marines as “losers” and “suckers.” The report, originally published in The Atlantic in 2020, was later confirmed by Trump’s then-chief of staff, John Kelly.
“Think of it from a practical standpoint,” Trump said while denying the event in Las Vegas Sunday. “I’m standing there with generals and military people in a cemetery” – Trump is off to an inauspicious start here, as he didn’t go to the cemetery – “and I look at them. I say ‘These people are suckers and losers.’ Now, think of it. Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?”
Who indeed?
On the First Amendment. “I do a great show,” the professional television personality said, referring to his interviews on Fox News. But then “they put on commercials that are just horrible,” evidently referring to commercials paid for by campaigns or organizations that are not pro-Trump. “They shouldn’t be doing that,” he said.
On if he loses to Biden: If he doesn’t win, Trump warned, “you’re headed to World War III. You are closer now to World War III than you’ve ever been, and this is no longer army tanks going back and forth shooting – World War II, World War… There are nuclear weapons the likes of which and the power of which has never, ever been seen before. So again I want to thank you all. I want to thank all the celebrities for being here. We have great celebrities.”
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At least it was a partly cloudy day, and and bit cooler than it has been. (While I was there, anyway; I left early to beat the traffic, and then caught the parts I’d missed on CSPAN). Still, six people were transported to hospitals, according to the Clark County Fire Department. Hopefully they’re all ok.
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