Madison Kwiecinski – Editor-in-Chief

mvk5945@psu.edu

Photo Credit: NBC News

Donald Trump, the twice-impeached 45th President of the United States has recently announced his campaign for reelection, a horrible decision in every aspect of the word. Trump is now running his third presidential campaign, attempting to become only the second U.S. President in history to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms. 

Every part of his announcement has left myself, as well as citizens on both sides of the aisle, screaming why? There could not be a worse candidate considering the political climate, and quite frankly there could not be a candidate who is worse for the Republican party. 

When regarding Donald Trump there is one thing he did undeniably well at, and that is spreading propaganda. He used conservative talking points and limited phrases so it stuck into his supporters’ heads, and after a while many people truly began to believe what he was saying regardless of how outrageous or improbable it was. 

For example, rather than admitting he lost an election because America was sick of his outlandish behavior and the disdain he received on a global scale, he spread false claims of an election being fraudulent. Instead of accepting the fact that he lost, he urged complete discourse and encouraged his supporters to storm and attack America’s capitol. At any other point in history every person who entered the capitol building by force that day would have been accused of treason, but instead many people left the capitol with stolen government property, and still found a way to make themselves the victims of that situation. 

Trump has encouraged an era of divisiveness that is unprecedented in America’s modern day politics. There has always been a divide between the parties, but Trump has managed to rip not only America in half, but also to split the Republican party directly in two. 

Mike Pence, Trump’s former Vice President who was clearly sick of Trump’s antics and political stunts has teased a presidential run against him. Ron DeSantis, who was originally a Trump backed candidate, has been separating himself from the former president as much as possible and quietly laying the groundwork for his own presidential campaign. Even PA Senate candidate Dr. Oz, who was Trump endorsed, seemed as though he was trying to distance himself from the former president prior to the election. Quite frankly, despite my feelings on all of those mentioned above, any of these candidates would make for a better president than Trump.

The Republican National Committee issued statements prior to Trump’s presidential bid announcement stating that he should hold off on announcing until closer to the election, because now that he has announced they are forced to stop covering his legal bills. Similarly to how Trump ran his presidency, he ignored the advice of everyone around him who is educated on the topic, and did whatever he wanted to by announcing this soon. He will face fundraising caps and elevated levels of scrutiny while we watch a two year long campaign drag on. 

Even as Trump made his presidential announcement he spread misinformation and propaganda. For the rest of this article I would like to explore some of the untrue or extremely exaggerated statements Trump made during his announcement, to hopefully shed light on the excessive amount of propaganda that spills from his mouth. 

Trump is currently under criminal investigation for taking documents he was not cleared to have access to post-presidency to his Florida home and resort.  In his speech, Trump once again tried to state this is something commonly done by the President, which it is not. Trump even went as far as to say, “Obama took a lot of things with him,” despite the fact that the National Archives Records Administration, NARA,  has publicly refuted these claims. Documents were taken to a NARA managed facility in the same area as Obama’s home, but the NARA has stated “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.” The NRA typically sets up an area for documents to be taken to in the vicinity of where a President;s future library will be based, as was the case with Obama. Additionally, Obama did not steal documents, but had he done so, stating you committed a crime simply because you know a person who got away with it is not a legal justification to do so.  

Another example of Trump intentionally misleading his supporters stems from his statements on gas prices, during his presidency and now. He stated, “We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline, and now it’s sitting five, six, seven and eight dollars, and it’s gonna go real bad.” The figure Trump uses is not the national average price of gas during his presidency, but the lowest number it hit during his presidency, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and peoples lack of travel. 

Gas prices lead well into the false claims Trump has made about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Trump stated his administration “filled up” the reserve and that it is now “virtually drained,” neither of which is true. Trump attempted to fill up the reserve by issuing a directive to buy tens of millions of barrels, but this was rejected in Congress and never happened. In fact, when Trump took office in 2017 there was more in the reserve than there was when he left in early 2021. Biden has released some oil to help lower the price of gasoline, but as of the beginning of November the reserve remained the largest in the world with over 329 million barrels of crude oil. 

Although Trump made several other untrue statements in his announcement speech, there is just one more I would like to draw attention to, as it quite literally could be a matter of life or death for people currently on earth: climate change. When talking about climate change he stated, “they say it may affect us in 300 years,” he stated. “They say the ocean will rise ⅛ of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years.” He then went on to insinuate we should not be worrying about climate change while nuclear weapons exist on earth because they are a bigger threat. However, denying climate change and the need to better our environment is dangerous. According to the U.S. National Ocean Service “sea levels along the U.S. coastline are projected to rise, on average, 10-12 inches in the next 30 years.” This is dangerous to ignore, and even more dangerous to publicly downplay, advertising his own misconception that we will not have to deal with the consequences. 

Trump’s presidential campaign is premature and full of misinformation, not to mention the extreme divisiveness it is sure to cause among the republican party. I truly hope that come midterms there are Republicans who run with the intention of getting back to the root of traditional conservative values and restoring the Republican party, rather than running to promote hate and misinformation for personal gain.