Trump’s Stunning Declaration in Now-Deleted Video Isn’t Helped By ‘Context’

President Donald Trump’s stunning rant about cutting or eliminating massively popular programs (from a now-deleted White House event) went viral — and all the “context” in the world doesn’t make it any better.

The White House deleted video footage of an hour-long Easter event featuring Trump at an “Easter Lunch” with Evangelical leaders that was supposed to be closed to the press and the public.

But when the event began, the White House launched a video stream of the entire event, which ran for an hour and four minutes and featured many memorable moments.

One exchange in particular went viral and got attention on cable news as a gaffe that could be the basis for campaign ads in the midterms. In the clip, Trump describes telling Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought not to “send any money” to states for “daycare” and went on to add in the massively popular Medicare and Medicaid programs.

On top of that, he cites his war with Iran as the reason:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I said to Russell, “Don’t send any money for daycare,” because the United States can’t take care of daycare!

That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare! We’re a big country! We’ve got 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars! We can’t take care of daycare.

You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay — they have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it and we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up for it.

But it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reacted by claiming that “Democrats and the left-wing media are dishonestly taking President Trump’s comments out of context.”

She argued that “President Trump was talking about the importance of stopping the scams and rooting out the billions of dollars in fraud in these vital programs that elected Democrat officials have allowed to happen.”

Other Trump allies have picked up on the talking point, as pro-Trump radio host Jason Rantz did on CNN Thursday night.

But the context to Trump’s remarks don’t help him in the least if you actually watch or listen to it. The viral remark was part of a five-minute weave that began with a reference to fraud in Minnesota and a racist rant about Somalia and debunked or fabricated accusations of fraud. IT concludes with the portion that went viral:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Russ Vought. Thank you, Russ. You got it. We would have a balanced budget. If you could get JD, if you’d get — how about in Minnesota?

They come from Somalia, but they come from all over. They’re all crooked in Minnesota. The governor is crooked. The attorney general is a crook. He’s a thief. Terrible guy.

All stupid, crooked people. And they came in from — in this case, Somalia is just terrible. A lot of people say it’s the worst country anywhere in the world. They have no money, no nothing. They have government, they have no police. They just shoot each other all day long.

It’s just a — it’s just pure bedlam. Probably the worst, most dangerous country. We have some beauties. They go to Minnesota and they stole 19 billion dollars. 19 billion dollars. And they’re low IQ, generally I mean, I can generalize, they’re a low IQ people. They’re bad people, they are.

They have 94% unemployment. In other words, they don’t want to work. You know, get a lot of jobs available, right, with the economy. They don’t wanna work. Why would they work?

And they sell more Mercedes Benz’s than any state in the Union because they come here with no money and they go out. They love a Mercedes Benz and they go out and buy Mercedes Benzes.

And I think you’re gonna get to the bottom of it real easy. And every one of them should be. And Ilhan Omar, who married her husband to, married her brother, her brother became her husband.

When she has to check a book, she says, any brothers, one, any husband, one. She checks two people.

So, on top of everything else, she gets a double income tax cut. She’s a stone-cold crook, and everybody knows it. And the papers, they have one paper out in particular. The guy made a living writing about her, and I spoke to him, he said, but nobody does anything about it, sir.

All you have to do is get his writings from — The Indianapolis Star or whatever paper he works for. You don’t even have to do any of this. This guy spent 10 years investigating that crook, and you gotta do something about it, or our people are gonna get very, they were already upset, takes too long.

So JD, you go do it, and Russell, you better do it. And I said to Russell, I said, daycare centers, right? So in Minnesota, in Los Angeles, they have thousands of them.

You’d say, how could you have it? There are more daycare centers than they have children. They literally, so they have thousands.

So we go and we send inspectors out. Of the 700 that they looked at, approximately, in Minnesota, there were not one. There was a daycare center. It’s homes where they send checks for thousands of dollars. It’s bad. And if they ever, and this has been going on for years, if they found out, if they got, and especially if really, look, in four years, on autism, Okay, children with autism in Minnesota.

Four years ago, Biden’s first term, it was less than $1 million was sent out for autism. This last year, it was over $400 million. So what happened? I said, was there an attack of autism? They went from $1 million to 400-plus and it’s pure — it’s pure theft and I hope we get to — and if we don’t get to it with stupid people, because we can balance the budget — we can balance the budget, we can have a surplus if you can–

And that doesn’t include Medicare, Medicaid, that’s even bigger and it’s many states, probably Republican states too, because they’re going to see it and they’re not as — we’re not as thievery, but you know, they don’t believe in thievery but when they see the Democrats doing it and then they have to compete with it so I can’t imagine they’re not doing it. I just can’t imagine.

But maybe they aren’t, I don’t know, but those Los Angeles is out of control. California, all over California. Maine. Who would have thought Maine? Maine’s one of the worst. Maine, I think of beautiful Maine, it’s one of the worst and the purpose of me saying that is because people in the room that could do something about it, and if they do something, we have a great country, we have a balanced budget because these are the kind of numbers.

So it’s true that Trump started out talking about fraud. But that’s not how context works. He started out by referring to Vought as “Darth Vader,” but that doesn’t mean his rant was about Star Wars.

Politicians often try this “out-of-context” dodge to confuse journalists into muddying the waters and making it seem like they actually said the thing they wish they had said instead of what they did say.

Trump explicitly said “it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things” because “we’re fighting wars” — a separate thought.

The fact that the White House deleted the video underscores the fact that this — and all the other bonkers stuff he and his worshippers said — were said in what Trump considered to be a “safe space” where he could reveal how he really felt. And cone November, voters will know, too.

Watch above via the now-deleted White House video.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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