On Monday evening, Donald Trump paid a visit to The O’Reilly Factor where the host tried to counsel Trump over his inflammatory ways. O’Reilly is a crotchety fellow, but even he thinks Trump travels too far into controversy. This on-air therapy session was not a productive one. O’Reilly tried to persuade Trump to soften his harsh stance on Syrian refugees:
“If it were me, and I was running as a Republican, instead of saying, ‘I don’t want ’em,’ I would say, ‘I’ll take some women and children, and they have to be properly vetted by the FBI, not homeland security, because we don’t trust them, but I will take some women and children who are languishing in these camps.’ That puts a human face on it and doesn’t put us in danger. Wouldn’t that be a smarter strategy?”
Trump did not agree, and he pointed towards the Boston bombing suspects (Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19) as evidence that “children” cannot be trusted. O’Reilly pushed forward to tell Trump he was bothered by the GOP’s candidate’s habit of retweeting misleading crime statistics, including this now-deleted tweet:
Trump retweeted the fictional statistic from the “Crime Statistics Bureau,” which does not exist. In response to O’Reilly’s question, Trump asked, “Am I gonna check every statistic?” Trump said he heard the information on all the radio shows, and O’Reilly’s amused reaction was a telling one.
There’s more Trump news: When we last left off with the most controversial GOP presidential candidate (sorry, Ben Carson), Trump caused a ruckus in Birmingham, Alabama. At that rally, Trump urged his followers to handle a Black Lives Matter protester, and Trump approved of how his attendees “roughed up” the man. Trump has also made progressively more outlandish statements about what he witnessed on September 11, 2001. On Monday, he continued his thoughts in Columbus, Ohio for an hour (he shows up at the 29-minute mark).
https://youtu.be/reBkHeQdiy4
Trump tripled down on his 9/11 observations with a claim that he witnessed people jumping from the Twin Towers. Trump, who lived more than four miles away at 5th Avenue’s Trump Tower, never responded to CNN when quizzed about his miraculous eyesight, but here’s what he said at the rally:
“Many people jumped and I witnessed it, I watched that. I have a view — a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center. And I watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit… I saw the second plane hit the building and I said, ‘Wow that’s unbelievable.”
Trump also expressed his wholehearted support for waterboarding:
“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. Don’t kid yourselves, folks. It works. You have to be strong. They don’t use waterboarding over there. They use chopping off people’s heads… We have great people in the Muslim population, but something’s happening. Something’s happening. I always say they’re not coming from Sweden that want to kill us, they’re not coming from Norway, they’re not coming from Denmark. They’re coming from a certain part of the world with a certain philosophy. We have to have strong surveillance.”
“Something’s happening” is a statement that begs for more elaboration, but let’s cut this conversation short while the getting’s good.
(Via CNN and Huffington Post)