Donald Trump played up his plans to tax companies that move jobs out of the United States as he tried to appeal to blue collar workers in a New York rally Sunday.
Speaking for about an hour Sunday in Rochester, N.Y., Trump recited statistics about the area’s loss of manufacturing jobs and economic hardship in recent years. He reiterated his desire to tax goods sold by companies once based in the United States that moved away to find cheaper labor.
The plan has been widely panned by economic experts. But the Rochester crowd ate it up.
“I’m the only one that knows how to stop them,” Trump said to cheers. “I would stop them so fast your head would spin.”
Trump is leading the polls in the Republican primary in his home state by a big margin. He’s up by more than 30 points over Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. He is working to top 50 percent in the New York in a bid to capture all the 95 delegates the state will send to the Republican convention. That would help Trump come closer in what now appears an uphill bid to secure 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the GOP nomination outright. He currently has 743 pledged delegates.
Much of Trump’s speech was delivered in the entertaining but rambling style he brings to many of his rallies, with protesters causing only minor disruptions.
Trump’s themes included adding manufacturing jobs, a concession to his location. But he focused mostly on his standard topics, the media’s malignancy, the injustice of the Republican nominating process, and pulling American troops out of other countries. Trump suggested the U.S. take troops out of South Korea and instead give the task the Japanese, whose military is limited by a U.S.-framed Constitution drawn up after World War II. Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, a brutal occupation that even today drives hostility between the countries.
Trump’s musing came after he repeated his desire to see the United States withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if the other countries don’t “pay their fair share” for U.S. military protection. Trump said American soldiers should be back in the United States protecting the homeland instead of protecting South Korea from North Korea.
“There is a school of thought that Japan would be better off dealing with [North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un] and we could sit back and watch on television for a change,” Trump said. “Would that make sense?”
Seconds later, Trump said he doesn’t want to see Japan rearm, but believes they need to pay their fair share.
Trump also responded to the decision by the Boston Globe’s decision to run a mock front page with headlines predicting the results of Trump policies by mocking the company’s finances.
“How about that stupid Boston Globe,” he said. “It’s worthless. It sold for a dollar,” he said.
“And then they run editorials telling me what I should be doing about Japan and Saudi Arabia and North Korea,” he said sarcastically.
Trump also accused Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon, of using the newspaper to protect Amazon from taxes.
“It was a loser, losing money hand over fist and it was purchased by the gentleman who runs and has a big stake in Amazon,” Trump said.
“Now, he uses that as a political weapon because he doesn’t want to pay taxes at Amazon,” Trump said. “That’s all it is folks. It’s so simple.”
Trump also drew comparisons between himself and his fellow New York City native, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
During a portion of his speech complaining about losing delegates to Cruz in Louisiana, Trump said it’s unfair that the will of voters in primaries and caucuses could be undermined at a convention due to delegate selection processes.
He said it’s the same thing happening to Sanders on the Democratic side, where he sees Sanders winning states but being told he has no chance.
“When I look at it and whether it’s me or it’s Bernie Sanders, and I see all these victories that I have and the victories that he’s got and then you look at the establishment,” Trump said, “And I want to tell you that it’s a corrupt deal that’s going on in this country.”
