Now, one of the things that I did with President Xi in China when I met him in Argentina at a summit (Dec. 2018)â before I even started talking about trade â it was a trade meeting, went very well, but before I talked about trade I talked about something more important.
I said listen, we have tremendous amounts of fentanyl coming into our country, kills tens of thousands of people, I think far more than anybody registers. And I'd love you to declare it a lethal drug and put it on your criminal list, and their criminal list is much tougher than our criminal list.
Their criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called how about a fine? And when I asked President Xi, I said do you have a drug problem? No, no, no, I said you have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem?
No we don't have a drug problem. I said why? Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs, end of problem. What do we do? We set up a blue ribbon communities. Lovely men and women, they sit around a table, they have lunch, they eat, they dine and they waste a lot of time.
So if we want to get smart, we can get smart. You can end the drug problem â can end it a lot faster than you think. But President Xi's agreed to put fentanyl on his list of deadly, deadly drugs, and it's a criminal penalty and the penalty is death.
âThe rich will not be gaining at all with this plan.â
Thatâs what President Donald Trump assured America on Sept. 13, 2017, as the Republican tax bill was being drafted. His views were echoed on several occasions by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
But more than a year after the tax bill was signed into law, it is becoming abundantly clear that the main benefits of the tax act actually do fall squarely on the rich. (...)
âAs Iâve said all along, the objective of the president is that rich people donât get tax cuts,â Mnuchin said Oct. 1, 2017, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. (...)
Trump made relatively few false claims last week in part because he did much less talking than usual. He spoke for just 42 minutes, according to data provided by the tracking website Factba.se, down from more than two hours in each of the preceding three weeks, during which he made 43, 52, and 78 false claims.
Two years after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made 8,158 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checkerâs database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.
That includes an astonishing 6,000-plus such claims in the presidentâs second year.
Put another way: The president averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in his first year in office. But he hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year, almost triple the pace. (...)
