With the whole slew of candidates that the GOP has been cooking up lately, it's sometimes easy to get lost in the mix of names. This is not a problem for Donald Trump, American businessman, billionaire, and avid user of the beloved phrase, “you're fired,” a man whom the majority of Americans can picture and probably formulate some opinion on. Now, since Mr. Trump has announced his run for presidency, there has been nothing short of a media circus concerning his various statements and beliefs. The art of analyzing whether or not a man or woman is fit to run one of the most powerful and influential countries in the world is not one I have, or probably will ever claim to have. That being said, when looking through a history of statements that Donald Trump has made, I, as a 20 year old, relatively well-educated, political science student, am going to make a judgment in saying that based solely upon some of the words that this man has spoken or tweeted directly, I do not believe he should now or ever be the President of the United States. Disagree or not, these things are still worth reading. In an age where every small utterance of speech is documented indefinitely, it’s difficult to determine how seriously we should consider every single statement when judging someone’s character. I would like to make the argument that Mr. Trump has, far too many times, said things that are too gravely inappropriate or damaging to still maintain a clean, professional image that I would hope most people would desire of the leader of the free world. Take them with a grain of salt, or as offensively as I did: here are five quotes that I believe demonstrate why Donald Trump should not be President of the United States.
1. “All of the women on "The Apprentice" flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected”
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/donald...
Starting off with a bang here. I have two things to say about this statement. The first is a comment on the sheer and utter narcissism that it must take to even think an idea like this. "The Apprentice" has been on for fourteen seasons in the United States. In any given season, there can be any number of female contestants; lets say for arguments sake, there are six women on the show for each season, and that totals up to approximately 84 women over the course of this TV show. For any man to think every single women he encountered would flirt with him, and that it is ‘expected,’ is just ridiculous, and shows an unhealthy level of self confidence, paired with the expectation that women are ‘all’ going to flirt. 84 out of 84 women. Gross. Do we really want a president who thinks he is so great that every single woman he encountered in his place of work was making some sort of advance on him? I sure don’t. My second point is that if Mr. Trump honestly thinks that every single woman on his TV show was flirting with him, even some from the deepest parts of their psyche which he, but not they, were able to detect, I would be terrified to know what he thinks about women’s education, intelligence, and purpose in life and in the work place. Maybe he respects their place in the working world. But if these women were all just flirting with him, instead of focusing solely on their ‘business’ ventures of the show, I think he may be a little misguided as to what a female's intentions may be.
2. “Obama has no solutions. Obama has failed the country and its great citizens, and they don’t like it when somebody such as myself speaks the truth about this – it hurts too much.”
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/donald...
Okay…well…not really, sir. I understand that this opinion, that Obama has done absolutely nothing, tends to be a popular one with some Republicans – many of them being presidential candidates. I would like to take a moment to debunk this myth once and for all. Whether or not you agree with what the current president has done does not suddenly make the legislation he has passed or helped to pass disappear. If you still disagree, and think that he has done nothing and has ‘no solutions,' I refer you to this list of 305 accomplishments of the current President Obama (with citations) from 2014, so this is not including all of the recent Supreme Court decisions that he helped to pass through. You can find that list here http://pleasecutthecrap.com/obama-accomplishments/.
So this statement is off base. Okay, many politicians either side of the line make statements in the same nature, but very few seem to insist that supporters of Obama are too butt-hurt by the idea that Obama ‘hasn’t done anything’ to acknowledge it. Obama supporters don’t acknowledge it because it simply is not true. His gross overgeneralizations and misguided judgements of multiple political parties, paired with an immature inability to make a concession such as, ‘Obama has done things with his time in office, but I don’t agree with them,’ makes me utterly frightened at his inability to see political climates realistically, let alone begin to even work with another political party besides his supposed ‘Republican’ supporters.
3.“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
http://www.business2community.com/government-polit...
4. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK, I hate to tell you.”
http://www.business2community.com/government-polit...
This one makes me particularly mad. This quote refers to Senator and previous presidential candidate John McCain. Now I’d just like to say that just because you’ve never served in the military doesn’t mean that you cannot still be an excellent president and commander in chief, but especially when you have never served in the military it is beyond disrespectful to discredit the horrors of being a prisoner of war, or even being in combat. John McCain was a PRISONER OF WAR. Maybe he wouldn’t have made a great president. Maybe you don’t agree with his politics. Maybe you do. But you CANNOT dispute the fact that this man was literally held prisoner for over five years. What good does it do to discredit the men that have served our country? If you honestly think you are going to have a fighting chance at being a respected president, and a respected commander in chief, then I highly suggest that you don’t discredit an entire branch of the government, one that is technically under your command. What also confuses me about this is that Donald Trump seems to have no inhibitions over alienating voters. He made a comment about immigrants, and now is making comments about the validity of a respected man’s military title. My guess is that his comment about immigrants made a few people very angry, and to then challenge the title granted by the military is to walk a delicate line of making supporters of the military and its honors very angry as well. Does he just not care about making entire populations of people angry and offended? I am honestly just confused.
5. “Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet! They don't believe it $$$$!”
This last one is a personal favorite. This quote is actually a tweet from Trump in January 2014, and it highlights a few key ideas. One, Trump’s tweets are uneducated, unsupported, and they make him sound like some paranoid 14 year old sitting in his basement tweeting whatever BS conspiracy pops into his head, not the potential future leader of our country. Two, I’m pretty sure the “GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS,” who I’m assuming are people who are SEEING THE LIGHT OF DAY enough to recognize that our planet is actually undergoing significant climate change (here’s an article from NASA if you’d like to read and then try to dispute that statement http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/), are not using these destructive weather patterns to ‘justify higher taxes’ just for the heck of it. If people are raising taxes in order to install preventative measures and set up systems to help save the environment, my guess is that it’s not a hoax and they actually believe that it is legitimate. And three, what would be the point of raising taxes and spending the money on more efficient energy, such as wind turbines (which Trump allegedly hates), if supporters of this movement didn’t actually think that global warming was a concern? Nah, we just felt like putting up some giant solar panels for fun! We just wanted to try and save some polar bears cuz they’re kinda cute! Seriously, what planet is this man living on? (Apparently not one where global warming is real and happening, hehe.)
I understand that sometimes people say ridiculous things, but this man has gone way too far. I get it, he is a very successful businessman, but what else has he done? Does he have a good international policy? No…not really. Does he know how to rally the troops and how to relate to our military population? Doesn’t seem so. Is he sensitive to minorities, and does he avoid making potentially very damaging statements about them? Nope! I just don’t get it. I do not think that this man, even just based upon five out-of-context quotes, is fit to run the country. And sadly, we are still almost a year away from the GOP choosing their candidate. Who knows what ridiculous thing Trump is going to say next.
