On Monday, Sept. 26, the first Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took place. This was originally predicted to be the largest viewed debate in American history and the prediction wasn’t wrong. By television numbers alone, the debate had over 80 million viewers. That doesn’t even include the other 35 million viewers from other media outlets, mainly the internet. That means over 115 million people were watching this debate. That is huge.
Speaking of huge, a candidate who also has a rather peculiarly huge following, Donald Trump, was under a large amount of focus by both media outlets and the viewers.
The first question of the debate was what kinds of jobs the candidates would create that would put money back into the pockets of the American workers. Trump began his response to the question by stating that a lot of our labor is being outsourced to Mexico and other countries. This outsourcing of our labor is a true and large issue that does need to be addressed. With companies laying off American workers and moving to countries like Mexico with less restrictions on how low wage and healthcare benefits need to be for their laborers, our labor class is failing. To solve this issue, he proposed that he would reduce taxes for companies operating in the U.S. from 35 to 15 percent.
After a lot of rebuttal between the two candidates, the debate moderator, Lester Holt, asked the nominees what they were going to do to heal the racial divide in the United States today. Trump’s response related to the riots and protests throughout the country and stated simply that we need “law and order in our country.” He stated that our Hispanic and African American populations are living in hell due to the neighborhoods being so dangerous. He concluded that this danger is mainly due to gangs roaming the streets composed of illegal immigrants with guns. So to create law and order, he wants to increase law enforcement in those areas.
These are very important topics today in our country. Trump brings out very important, yet vague, responses to these issues. Whether you recognize his status as a politician, or want to continue identifying him as “just a business man,” you have to recognize that these largely vague statements with a small number of facts and conclusions are a common pattern with politicians regarding our presidential elections. Trump is no exception. The issue with Trump is that he is not saying very much about these things.
Seriously, I had to go reread the transcript from the debate and acquire these small paragraphs of information after going through almost the entire debate. Why’s that? Because most of his other statements are about petty personal things like mudslinging aimed towards Hillary Clinton or other groups. Don’t get me wrong, Hillary threw mud too, but she seemed to always move back to some sort of facts and kept a form of focus. Trump was all over the place.
Sure we need to solve the drop in the American labor class, but dropping taxes on the companies themselves has not benefitted the lower class in the past. It’s a nicely dressed up policy that’s designed to appeal to special interest groups. Yes, crime in impoverished areas is a huge concern, but taking a militaristic approach towards minority groups that already don’t have the power in our own country is only going to strengthen the tension we already have.