San Francisco, California
October 2021
Dr. Gloria Duffy
Hello everyone and welcome to this evening’s program of the Commonwealth Club of California. I’m Gloria Duffy, President and CEO of the club and I’ll be our moderator for this evening’s very special program with Mr. Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States. President Trump will speak for about an hour after which we have allocated an additional 30 minutes for questions and answers. We would like to remind you to submit questions for Mr. Trump on the three-by-five cards near your seats. A complete transcript of the presentation, including questions and answers, will be posted on Mr. Trump’s website, DonaldJTrump.com.
So, let’s get right to it. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce President Donald J. Trump.
President Trump
It is quite an honor to speak to you this evening at the Commonwealth Club. While I am speaking to you after I left office, I am reminded that President Franklin Roosevelt spoke here shortly before the 1932 election.
In that speech he said, and I heartily agree, that the Commonwealth Club has stood as a group of citizen leaders interested in fundamental problems of government, and chiefly concerned with achievement of progress in government through non-partisan means.
In the next hour or so we have together, I would like to argue that some of my most controversial policy initiatives were rooted in an attempt to promote good government based on universal principals. Allow me to consider that statement a “motion” in the sense of an Oxford style debate.
It is true that I am speaking to you this evening without rebuttal, but I would like you to afford me some leeway here, because it is also true that virtually all of you are aware of the many sources and forms of adverse commentary I have received since my ride down the escalator in the spring of 2015.
So, as Ms. Duffy said in her brief but gracious introduction, let’s get to it.
Immigration Policy
I am going to start with immigration policy. In 1986 Congress passed, and President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Shortly thereafter three million illegal immigrants applied for amnesty and the vast majority of the applications were approved. The new law required employers to attest to employee immigration status and made knowingly hiring unauthorized immigrants illegal.
We all know what happened. The 1986 reform did not work. Those exact words appeared in a Washington Post article written eight years ago. The article also said:
The law was supposed to put a stop to illegal immigration into the United States once and for all. Instead, the exact opposite happened. The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the country soared, from an estimated 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million today.
We could go on and on about this subject, but I would like to focus in these brief minutes I have with you on an important and adverse economic consequence of the failure of our immigration policy.
I’ll begin with a quote from Roosevelt’s speech here on September 23, 1932:
Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him.
Let’s consider the right to make a comfortable living – the right to work – by looking at some unemployment figures provided by U.S. Census Bureau:
The first column shows that the information is in the form of snapshots taken every five years from 2000 to 2015. The figures are not yet available for the year 2020, so the table ends with the year 2019. The second column shows the unemployment rate for persons aged 25 to 64 who have not earned a high school diploma. The third column shows the same rate for persons of all education attainment levels. The fourth column shows the spread between the rates. I call this spread the low-skilled employment gap in the United States.
The highest employment gap was 7.7 percentage points in 2010, in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008. The lowest gap was in 2019, during my third year of office. Over the past 20 years, the low-skilled employment gap has averaged about five percentage points.
Now, considering that people in the United States with less than a high school diploma are chronically under employed, why would we want to encourage low-skilled workers from Mexico and Central America to come here? Why do we not settle for only the strictest enforcement of our immigration laws?
There are 20 million people over the age of 25 in our country who do not have a high school diploma, according to the Census Bureau. In a typical year, five percent of them, one million U.S. citizens, find themselves unemployed compared to the rest of our population.
Common sense says that a minimum of 11 million low-skilled illegal immigrants cited in the Washington Post article provide stiff competition in the job market for our native born low-skilled workers.
As an alternative, may I point to our neighbors to the north, where there is a points-based immigration system that considers factors like level of education, language proficiency, work experience and the need for financial support for outsiders who want to live, work and settle in Canada.
When the time comes for us to take another stab at immigration reform, I would argue for the inclusion of at least two provisions:
First, in light of the failure of the 1986 act, any future reform should call for enforcement first, and multi-year confirmation that the enforcement is working, before any kind of amnesty is granted to individuals who have entered the United States illegally
Second, any reform should discourage entry of low-skilled immigrants when the low-skilled employment gap is high. To generalize on this idea, we should encourage immigration of individuals whose characteristics would benefit our country and are in short supply here.
To conclude on this subject, I believe that smartly crafted immigration reform will help our lowest skilled workers in particular, and the United States as a whole. I also believe we must do more in addition to immigration reform. We need to do more to help Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean nations. The United States should undertake a multi-generational plan to help our neighbors south of the border. I do not know what the details might be, but it should be marked by voluntary collaboration, friendship and mutual respect.
Energy Policy and Climate Change
My second topic will be the promotion of energy independence in the United States and climate change. Now, I have to say that it seems quite odd to be talking about climate change as a pressing issue in the United States. According to the Gallop organization, when I left office in January of 2021 just two percent of those polled thought that a combination of the environment, pollution and climate change was the most important problem facing our country.
My discussion will be centered on two ideas. First, although global temperatures have risen since the turn of the 20th century, the current temperature regime does not represent anything unusual compared to the past. Second, despite media reports to the contrary, catastrophically rising temperatures in the coming decades are not likely to occur.
Let’s start the discussion about how our climate has changed over the years. We know the earth has had periodic ice ages that lasted up to 100,000 years or more with warmer inter-glacial periods in between. Here’s a chart from the Utah Geological Survey showing the cycle over the past 450,000 years.
That last sharp increase on the right side of the chart shows the end of the most recent glacial period called the Wisconsin Glaciation in North America. The swings in temperature from the bottoms to the tops of the cycles average about 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Here are a few observations. First, it looks like the glacial periods are getting longer. Second, the current inter-glacial is about eight degrees cooler currently than the maximum temperature of the one preceding it. And finally, if we take closer look at the current inter-glacial, what do we see?
About five to ten thousand years ago it was about two degrees warmer than it is now. That period is known as the Holocene Climatic Optimum.
Now let’s take a closer look at the last 10,000 years. Here’s a chart presented in 2013 by ARD, Germany’s version of the BBC or our own PBS:
In this chart we see the Holocene Optimum occurred between four thousand and eight thousand years ago. I am sure many of you are wondering, how did the polar bears survive?
After the Holocene Optimum there are cyclical fluctuations of warmer and cooler periods – most notably the Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the current warming period that began around 1850.
Now there’s no question the earth has warmed since 1850, but that was after the Little Ice Age, so I think the warming was welcome. And from the ARD chart, it is clear that there were three comparably warm periods before our current warming period, and that the current warming period is dwarfed by the two Holocene temperature peaks.
Now we have seen there is persuasive evidence that the current temperature regime is not unusual compared to historical norms. This is a good start but we need more information to inform policy decisions regarding energy independence and climate change.
What about the warming since the turn of the 20th century? Let’s look at a passage from Meteorology Today. This textbook provides a wonderful perspective on the evolution of climatology because the first edition was published in 1982 and the most recent 13th edition came out at the beginning of this year. This quote is from the Fourth Edition, published in 1991.
Is Warming Real? Earlier we learned that, since the beginning of this century, the earth’s surface appears to have warmed by 0.5°C. There are, however, uncertainties in the temperature record. For example, during this time, recording stations have moved, techniques for measuring temperatures have varied, and overall there is a sparcity of marine observing stations. Moreover, there is a tendency for urbanization (especially in developed nations) to artificially raise average temperatures as cities grow in size – the urban heat island effect. When urban warming is taken into account and improved sea surface temperatures are incorporated into the data, it appears that global temperatures over the last 100 years may have risen from 0.3°C and 0.5°C.
Is the warming trend due to increasing levels of CO2 and other trace gases? A few scientists contend that it is. Most believe that it is too early to tell. Some point to the fact that many mathematical climate models predict that, due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases, average global temperatures should have risen by at least 1°C, instead of less than 1°C, as observed. Others feel that the warming is statistical in nature and falls within the earth’s natural variability of climate change.
In an attempt to find a signal that suggests that greenhouse gases may have already altered earth’s climate, researchers examined rainfall and temperature data with the contiguous United States over a period dating back to 1895. But they could find no overall trend in either rainfall or temperature. Another study examined satellite measurements to see if the lower atmosphere warmed between 1979 and 1988, only a few years in the long-term record. But the satellite data could detect no significant rise during this short period.
A few scientists even contend that the problem of global warming is overstated. They believe that there are too many uncertainties in the climate models to adequately represent the highly complex atmosphere, especially with respect to clouds and oceans. Some feel that several warm years during the 1980s (especially 1983 and 1987) were the result of El Niño/Southern Oscillation events, rather than increasing levels of greenhouse gasses.
With levels of CO2 increasing by about 25 percent over the past 100 years, why has the observed increase in global temperatures been so small? Some researchers feel that the large heat capacity of the ocean is delaying the warming of the atmosphere. Others suggest that the cooling witnessed for about 30 years (beginning in the 1940s) may have been due to industrial emissions of sulfur dioxide that increased the reflectivity of clouds and haze. Also, other factors – such as volcanic eruptions that inject large quantities of dust into the stratosphere, and changes in the radiation output of the sun – may be countering warming.
Indeed, because the interactions between the earth and its atmosphere are so complex, no one can unequivocally demonstrate that the recent warming trend has been due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, many scientists feel that future research will probably reveal that these gases are mainly responsible for the warming.
Notice the moderate stance with respect to the recent warming. Notice that the authors of this text are not saying “The science is settled.” Far from it.
Here is a passage from the same section of the book from the Fifth Edition published in 1994:
Indeed, because the interactions between the earth and its atmosphere are so complex, no one can unequivocally prove that the warming trend has been due primarily to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, most climate scientists contend that future research will reveal that these gases are responsible for at least in part of the warming.
And from the Sixth Edition, published in 2000:
Indeed, because the interactions between the earth and its atmosphere are so complex, it is difficult to unequivocally prove that the recent warming trend has been due primarily to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. The problem is that any human-induced signal of climate change is superimposed on a background of natural climatic variations (“noise”) such as the El Niño-Southern oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. Moreover, in the temperature observations it is difficult to separate a signal from the noise of natural climate variability.
Things change as the Seventh Edition was published in 2003. In the chapter on climate change the authors include the famous hockey stick chart, which turned the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age into one long decline, followed by record high temperatures not seen in a thousand years:
This chart, which also appeared in the Third Annual Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, became very controversial. Indeed, in February 2005, an article published in Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union, concluded the following:
However, it has not been previously noted in print that, prior to their principal components (PCs) analysis on tree ring networks, they carried out an unusual data transformation which strongly affects the resulting PCs. Their method, when tested on persistent red noise, nearly always produces a hockey stick shaped first principal component (PC1) and overstates the first eigenvalue.
Pretty cool, right? Put in nearly random data and no matter what, it gets transformed into a hockey stick.
I am going to circle back to the Seventh Edition of Meteorology Today, the one that came out in 2003. The authors talk about many possible reasons why climate might change, like feedback mechanisms, plate tectonics, the earth’s orbit, aerosols in the atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, and variations in solar output. They also wonder why the climate began to cool after 1940 and what caused the “exceptionally cold winters during the 14th and 19th centuries.” They also continue as they did in previous editions:
… it is important to realize that the interactions between the earth and its atmosphere are so complex that it is difficult to unequivocally prove that the warming trend during the past 100 years has been due primarily to increasing concentrations of greenhouses gases. The problem is that any human-induced signal of climate change is superimposed on a background of natural climatic variations (“noise”), such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. Moreover, in the temperature observations, it is difficult to separate a signal from the noise of natural climate variability. However, today’s more sophisticated climate models – uh-oh! – are much better at filtering out this noise while at the same time taking into account those forcing agents that are both natural and human-induced.
It seems like the authors want to have it both ways here. In the end, however, they defer to the climate models with a quote from the third IPCC report:
In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the past 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.
Just so you know, in the jargon of the IPCC, “likely” means greater than a 66% chance.
How can non-scientists evaluate the “complex climate models?” One way is to compare their projections to actual results. According to the Seventh Edition of Meteorology Today published in 2003, climate models were projecting temperature increases between 1.4°C and 5.8°C from 1990 to the year 2100. As it turns out, the actual global temperature rate of change through mid-2021 was slightly below the lower end of projected range.
Here’s another chart of data from NOAA that suggests the rate of change in temperature in the United States has been virtually zero during the time since the 2003 edition of Meteorology Today was published:
There’s a great story that led to this data set from NOAA. A smart guy published a paper in The Journal of Geophysical Research in 2011 showing that one-third of reported temperature increases in the United States was due to poor citing of weather stations. More than half of them were close to a heat source (like in the middle of an airport or in a paved parking lot) that biased temperature records upward. The kicker is that scientists were raising temperature readings from well-sited weather stations to conform more closely to the poorly cited stations. You can’t make this up! To their credit, people at NOAA created a new temperature index for the United States that uses only properly cited weather stations that are free of nearby heat sources.
So, what we see is little to no temperature increase in the United States over the past fifteen years. And, as they say on cable television, there’s more. The lack of a rising trend is probably not just happenstance. Here’s an interesting chart:
Do you recall that we talked about climate models projecting global temperature increases between 1.4°C and 5.8°C in the 2003 edition of Meteorology Today? Well, published estimates of the effect of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide have declined since then.
In the meantime, if you listen to mainstream media outlets, the screams over the horror of catastrophic global warming have become constantly louder and shriller over the past several years. If you will allow me to take the lead from the late Sue Grafton, it would seem that H is for Hyperbole, H is for Hysteria and H is for Hell is Around the Corner.
So what is a policy maker to do? In light of the fact that global temperature sensitivity estimates for increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide have come down sharply in the past 15 years, and at the same time, considering that global temperatures have not changed substantially, and finally, since the current temperature regime is not unusual compared to past regimes, I would argue that extreme responses to any perceived threat from our changing climate are not justifiable.
Policies proposed by the catastrophic global warming crowd will cost the United States jobs. Their solutions will not change our climate meaningfully. In short, if we follow their lead, we will be poorer, and the lower economic output will hurt the most vulnerable amongst us. Finally, may I remind you that it is our wealth that allows us to fund research to improve our environment?
Did you know that per capita emissions of CO2 peaked in 1973 in the United States? Did you know that carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption in the United States in 2019 were about the same as they were in the early 1990s, when the population of the United States was 25% lower than it is now? We have made tremendous progress and it is was not due to our government. Rather it was innovation in the energy industry, in particular, innovation that allowed us to increase the percentage of cleaner burning natural gas in our energy portfolio.
We don’t have to put people out of work in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and South Dakota. We don’t have to curtail energy exploration in Alaska or cancel new pipelines. The reckless push towards “net-zero emissions” will only make us poorer and less secure.
What we should do is encourage research and development in the energy industry. We should continue our research in clean coal, and in cleaner ways to burn oil and natural gas. We should invest in nuclear energy, and in hydrogen as an energy source. And, yes, we should continue our research into renewables. If someone can really solve the intermittency problem – that is, come up with a clean and efficient way to store energy – renewable energy like solar and wind will become much more valuable to us.
In sum, encouraging the energy industry to innovate will lead to a prosperous, clean and secure environment not only for us here in the United States but also for the world as a whole.
Race Relations
This third part of my talk will be the shortest, but you are not off the hook because I shall be giving quite the homework assignment in the coming minutes.
I would like to start this discussion with a quote attributed to Frederick Douglass. I am told he wrote:
It has long been the desire of our enemies to deepen and widen the line of separation between the white and colored people of this country.
I believe the words ring just as true today as when Mr. Douglass wrote them. Rather than arguing in the affirmative, however, I am going to leave it to you to consider the proposition yourself.
Now I am going to argue that it is a necessary condition for all Americans to know how people of color have been treated in the past to appreciate how they feel today.
Every American should read the works of Frederick Douglass. In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written just seven years after he escaped to freedom, Mr. Douglass details the cruelty of slavery in America.
Every American should read Booker T. Washington. Consider his autobiography Up from Slavery. Washington, a champion of education and entrepreneurship, was a slave as a child and barely 10 years old at the close of the Civil War.
Every American should read works of W.E.B. Du Bois like The Souls of Black Folk, where he details the weight of trying to reconcile being a black in the Jim Crow era, and at the same time being an American in the so-called land of the free.
Every American should read Zora Neale Hurston. In How It Feels to Be Colored Me, she is frank in her discussion about how she was treated by whites and how that treatment informed her outlook on life.
There’s a wonderful pair of books, one is called Remembering Slavery; the other, Remembering Jim Crow. The first volume provides oral histories of blacks who lived as slaves, while the second has interviews with blacks who lived as free individuals during the years that followed the Civil War.
I say we should read because understanding our history will make us better citizens and neighbors. It will help us to put our hearts in the right place. It will help us become a nation marked by good will amongst its men and women.
Now I would like to close by again invoking Franklin Roosevelt, who more than eighty years ago ended his speech here, in part, by saying:
Failure is not an American habit; and in the strength of great hope, we must all shoulder our common load.
God bless you all.
God bless America.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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Dr. Gloria Duffy
We’re going to a take break now – not more than 15 minutes – after which President Trump will field your questions.
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Dr. Gloria Duffy
Okay, everyone freshened up? Let’s get to the questions. We’ve chosen what I think will be an interesting mix. Here’s the first one. “Mr. President, what’s your take on Critical Race Theory? Do you think it should be taught in schools?”
President Trump
It may surprise you to learn that I do not have a problem with Critical Race Theory. It is the work of scholars going back to the late 1980s. It looks at relationships between race and the law in our country. It argues that even in a colorblind society, subtle forces can work to hurt people of color.
That said, we should not teach children that they are better than other children based on their race or sex. We should not teach children that they are racist because of their race. We should not teach children to treat other children differently because of race or sex.
As I said, I agree that Critical Race Theory has a place in our colleges and even in advanced high school classes. But academia should be open minded enough to consider other causes of social disparities in our country. If your camera has only one lens – the lens of race – you are going end up with a distorted picture of America.
Dr. Gloria Duffy
“Mr. Trump, you received your share of criticism about COVID policy in the last year of your term. What would you consider doing differently if you could have a do-over?”
President Trump
I am the first to admit that the messaging was chaotic at times. But I would argue, in the main, we got a lot of things right. We recognized the threat early and constrained foreign travel into the United States. We made sure that states and localities had resources. Our most important work was getting a vaccine in place quickly through a partnership between government agencies, principally Health and Human Services and the Defense Department, and the private sector. You know, it often takes up to ten years or more to get a vaccine approved. We began the first vaccinations in mid-December and a month later we were vaccinating nearly a million Americans a day.
Dr. Gloria Duffy
Our next question is about climate change. It’s worded a little aggressively. “I hereby accuse you of not following the science regarding climate change. Defend yourself, if you can.”
President Trump
You may be disappointed to learn that “science” does not write policy on tablets of stone that FedEx delivers to the White House and Congress.
Policy comes from careful consideration of a wide range of disciplines including natural science, economics and other social sciences. Congress and the executive branch must consider the balance between the expected upside and downside from policy proposals. As I said earlier, there is little to no quantifiable upside from sharply reducing carbon emissions, and a tremendous amount of downside.
I think this would become more clear if we actually had a national debate about climate policy. But sadly, many think “the science is settled” and, as a result, have stifled any serious discussion on the subject. That’s nonsense and everyone should know better.
Dr. Gloria Duffy
Mr. Trump, may I insert my own follow-up question here regarding climate change? What about all of the extreme weather experienced globally over the past several years?
President Trump
My quick answer is that so-called extreme events are weather and not climate. But let’s start by looking at what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says about extremes in temperature over the past century or so in the United States.
Now you can see that the red lines have risen above 70% several times in the last 25 years. But is this extreme? Since temperatures in general have risen about one degree in the last century or so, we’d expect to see just what the chart shows. But look at the beginning of the 20th century. The highest reading actually came around 1910 and it is surrounded by persistent extremes in cold weather. So yes, we have had warmer weather, but it is clearly not “off the charts” compared to warm and cold temperature extremes in previous years.
Now let’s consider rain and droughts. Here’s the same style of chart from NOAA showing very wet and very dry periods in the United States. In this case I would say that there are unequivocally no trends in wet and dry periods over the 125 years covered in this chart.
Here’s another chart from NOAA showing the Palmer Drought Severity Index in the Continental United States. The heavier line shows a nine-year average of the figures represented in the thinner line. There’s no trend.
What about hurricanes? Here’s a chart showing the number of hurricanes in the United States from 1851 through 2018. Again, no trend.
What about tornados? If anything, the number of violent tornados has declined over the past 70 years.
There are two things that have contributed to the impression that we are experiencing more weather extremes. First is land use. There are a lot more people living in vulnerable areas than in earlier times. Second, weather events come to our attention much more quickly through the media compared to years past.
Dr. Gloria Duffy
This may be our final question. “President Trump, even your strongest supporters criticized your public demeanor – the Twitter outbursts and the rest. If you could use a way-back machine, would you tweak this aspect of your presidency?”
President Trump
I’ll offer three thoughts on this subject. First, commentary via social media provided me a direct link to the American public and the world. Sure, the usual broadcast and print outlets would edit things in a way that changed my meaning. But any fair-minded journalist or regular individual could easily check what I actually said.
Second, you might recall how Dan Rather tried derail President Bush’s re-election campaign with bogus documents about his service in the Texas National Guard. Or that Harry Reid lied when he said that Mitt Romney had paid no income taxes for 10 years. Well, at least people could see those accusations and make their own judgments.
Now consider a lawyer for the Democratic party lying to the FBI about our computers being connected to a Russian bank’s computers or the whole Russia-gate conspiracy fashioned by the Hilary Clinton campaign, the FBI and the media. Those hideous actions might not have seen the light of day. Through social media, I was able to profess my innocence, and eventually I was vindicated.
Finally, I’d like to comment on this notion of maintaining a demeanor appropriate to the presidency. When President Clinton lied about having an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinski, what was his wife Hilary doing in the background? Trying to destroy Ms. Lewinski’s credibility. Unfortunately for them, Monica did not send her blue dress to the dry cleaners. There is a very thin veneer to this notion of acting in a manner appropriate to the presidency.
For better or worse, my commentary on social media was out in the open for everyone to see. It may be poor form for a president but it may also be that no form is better.
Dr. Gloria Duffy
I heard a few groans when I said we were about to close things out here. Why don’t we try to squeeze in a few more questions? Let’s send out a mike to the audience.
Audience Member
Mr. Trump, why do you think that democratic politicians have been insulated from immigration policy that hurts the least fortunate among us?
President Trump
First of all, that insulation is fraying. I was elected in large part because of support from working class people. The Census Bureau says the voting rate was 67% in the 2020 election. But for those with no high school diploma, that rate was only 40%. Now if I were pointy headed, I might say that, by definition, most of them have not taken a macroeconomics class. I could also invoke What’s the Matter with Kansas? – and claim they don’t know what’s good for them. But I think they have for decades been so ground down by insidious democratic- and republican-led domestic policies that the struggle to stay above water makes voting seem like a wasteful luxury. How will voting help if the global crowd in power keeps pounding them down?
Dr. Gloria Duffy
Let’s take another question from the audience.
Audience Member
President Trump, do you really think reading a few books will solve race relations in the United States?
President Trump
Reading is a necessary condition, but it’s just a start. According to Gallop polling in 1963, nearly 70 percent of black adults believed that race relations in the United States would eventually be worked out. That figure dropped to a low of 32% in the spring of 2001. Over the past 10 years it has fluctuated from a low of 42 percent to a high of 54 percent just last summer. It’s hard to believe that hope on the part of black adults has been rising irregularly for the past 20 years. Is that the impression you get from television, print and social media? My guess is that many of you would say no. That’s because the loudest amongst us represent a small minority of Americans.
There are millions of Americans who get up every day and hold no ill will to their brothers and sisters based on race. They work together, play together and go to church together. They go to their kids’ birthday parties. Increasingly, they marry a person of another race.
How do we make things better? Think Aretha Franklin. Think respect. Think the golden rule – treat others the way you would want them to treat you. Think defuse rather than escalate. Follow these rules. At all levels of government. At work. At school. At soccer games. At the grocery store. Follow these rules everywhere and all Americans will be happier.
Now there are still places, both urban and rural, where Americans suffer from the effects of drugs and high rates of violent crime. How do we lift the quality of life for these communities?
One place to start is to strengthen representative government at the local level, but more importantly, at the micro level.
What if we were to provide, subject to a community’s approval, security for children going to and from school? Could we offer security in buildings for tenants who ask for it? How do we provide better job counseling and get more employers in places where jobs are needed?
I think the trick is engage each community and let it choose its priorities. Then we help them meet those priorities. As people feel their voices being heard, little by little, citizen by citizen, a new normal can prevail.
Dr. Gloria Duffy
I’m glad we decided to go straight the audience. Let’s do two more questions.
Audience Member
Mr. President, what do think about the way government agencies and the media handled protests in the summer of 2020 and the protest on January 6th of this year?
President Trump
The wonderful thing about your question is that people can see the answer with their own eyes. They saw television networks report about “mostly peaceful protests” with burning buildings in the background. They saw cowardly anarchists dressed in black taking cheap shots at peaceful assemblies. They saw the shuttered businesses in dozens of cities across America.
Obviously, there is no excuse for trespassing, stealing or damaging property. But it’s the weirdest thing. People saw a video of a police officer opening a door to the Capital Building for the protestors. They saw people milling about in the Rotunda as if they were in an art gallery or a shopping mall. They saw protestors talking to police inside the Capitol Building after which, and I’ll call this fellow Thor, said “We have to be peaceful. We have the right to peacefully assemble.” (I guess he didn’t get the memo on split infinitives.)
Unquestionably, there were people who were trespassing with malicious intent. But there were also a lot of people in the Capitol Building that day who honestly did not realize they were breaking the law.
To me, the saddest part of this episode was the utter failure of the agencies entrusted to protect the Capitol Building. The lack of preparation and lack of resources strikes me as beyond credibility to the point where I wonder: Were they that stupid, or was the whole thing a setup?
Dr. Gloria Duffy
And our final question comes from you, yes, you in the blue crewneck sweatshirt.
Audience Member
Mr. Trump, I believe you said the election was stolen last year. I know we don’t have a lot of time now, but can you please justify that statement?
President Trump
I am going to infer from your question that you recognize there are a lot of moving parts in a U.S. presidential election and that I cannot go through all of them chapter and verse in this forum.
But let’s do the following thought experiment. Suppose the election were run according to the times, places and manner prescribed by each state legislature, meaning that none of the pre-election extra-legislative changes made by state and local authorities took place. Under those circumstances, would I have won the election? Yes, it is likely. Yes, I’d say greater than a 66% chance. Yes, that’s about right.
Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a wonderful audience. And to Dr. Duffy and the Commonwealth Club, thank you so much and God Bless you all.
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