President Donald Trump, unlike his predecessor in office Joe Biden, talks with reporters quite frequently. In those press conferences and other interactions, Trump makes some misstatements of fact. To an extent it makes sense to cut him some slack regarding misstatements in extemporaneous and impromptu communication. But, Trump making clear misstatements of fact in his annual State of the Union speech is another matter. That is just what we saw when Trump presented the annual speech Tuesday evening.
Tag: State of the Union
President Donald Trump’s efforts, through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and otherwise, to reduce United States government spending is the focus of much attention. Indeed, in his speech Tuesday night in the US Capitol, Trump listed several expenditures his administration had uncovered that he categorized as “appalling waste.” He also declared that his administration would balance the budget, something he noted had not been accomplished in 24 years.
It was thus peculiar that Trump slipped into his over hour and a half speech a shout-out to one of the groups most notorious for involvement in massive spending by the United States government — the military-industrial complex. The shout-out, though, was likely not understood by most people. This is because Trump did not use the term “military-industrial complex.”
Francis S. Collins, the director of the United States government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), went full-on authoritarian in his Sunday interview with Jake Tapper at CNN’s State of the Nation. Collins, in the interview, supported in short succession the imposing of several extreme violations of the freedom of people who have chosen not to take experimental coronavirus vaccines — some of which are not even vaccines under the normal meaning of the term.
Use vaccine passports to prevent these individuals from attending public events and entering businesses, fire them from their jobs, and bar them from traveling, Collins championed.