How Trump Points The Tea Party Towards Occupy
Back in 2011, Donald Trump wanted President Obama to put a stop to the Occupy Wall Street protests.
This is class warfare, and this is probably the only way that he thinks he can get elected because he’s done a lousy job as president.”
Since then, he was bested by Obama who effectively put an end to birtherism in responding to Trump’s silly birth certificate challenge. Trump’s no dummy, and he’s certainly smarter, more popular, and richer than the group of Republicans he’s running against. He’s articulating popular liberal positions as a “Republican”, and the conservative base is eating it up. They just needed these positions presented to them in the form of an old, rich, white male. Who knew?
Tea Party
Trump has praised the tea party’s efforts to hold the federal government accountable and discussed how the group has been discredited by the Republican establishment. The same establishment, from both parties, that obviously opposed both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Movements. In fact, Trump just won a Nashville Tea Party Straw Poll. Trump knows the Tea Party has lost and is in search of a leader.
Hedge Funds
Occupy Wall Street was all in the name. Policy wise, liberals led by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to raise taxes on hedge fund managers by getting rid of carried interest, a loophole which allows certain hedge fund and private equity managers to have their earnings taxed at the lower capital gains rate rather than the income tax rate because they are managing capital for clients. Donald Trump does now also.
The Iraq War
In 2002, Barack Obama said in his hallmark speech opposing the Iraq War:
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
After the war started in 2004, Donald Trump said in response to why he thought then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should have presented Articles of Impeachment against President Bush:
“Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true,”
Occupy Wall Street
Trump is pied piping “conservatives” to the left, and they don’t even know it. “Bush lied, people died”, and “hedge fund guys aren’t paying their fair share” is “1% vs. 99%” rhetoric. This is Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren policy coming from the Republican frontrunner. There is no more Tea Party, but who knew Trump would carry Occupy’s message in a GOP primary and possibly win with it?