The Time Donald Trump Dismissed Half of America as Losers
So here’s the Donald telling half the country that they are lazy freeloaders. This huge mischaracterization of people went unremarked until David Corn at Mother Jones pointed it out. Basically the Donald is once again giving us the Mitt Romney line.
Despite Trump’s purported outrage over the Clinton remark, the mogul has engaged in his own demonization of Americans that has echoed the “47 percent” comment that landed Mitt Romney in trouble during the 2012 campaign. More than once, the reality television celebrity has dismissed tens of millions of Americans—up to half of all Americans—as shiftless people with no desire to work. During a June 2015 interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Trump declared:
The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent.
Trump had expressed this view before. During a January 2015, interview with Kasie Hunt of MSNBC, he proclaimed, “We have a tremendous amount of people in this country that don’t want to work. They have no inclination to work.”
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When Romney was caught saying that 47 percent of Americans do not accept the responsibility to take care of themselves, Trump declared that Romney should not apologize because he was essentially correct. “You do have a large percentage of people not paying taxes,” Trump said at the time. “You do have a large percentage of people that feel they’re entitled.” Entitled to handouts and a free ride, that is.
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