US President Donald Trump has made a lot of broken promises during his time in office. He promised to lower prescription drug prices, get Mexico to pay for a border wall, and he even said a 10 per cent tax cut for the middle class was on the way before the 2018 midterms. That tax cut never materialised, obviously. But Trump’s latest promise might be the biggest lie of them all. The US President promised to cure cancer and eradicate AIDS if he’s re-elected in 2020.
“We will push onward with new medical frontiers. We will come up with the cures to many, many problems, to many, many diseases, including cancer and others and we’re getting closer all the time,” Trump shouted Tuesday night in Orlando, Florida while formally launching his re-election campaign.
“We will eradicate AIDS in America once and for all and we’re very close,” Trump continued. “We will lay the foundation for landing American astronauts on the surface of Mars.”
Strangely, Trump wasn’t the first high-profile politician to promise a cancer cure recently. Joe Biden, one of the current frontrunners for the Democratic nomination for president, said just last week that if he’s elected we’ll find a cure for cancer.
“I’ve worked so hard in my career that, I promise you, if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America: We’re going to cure cancer,” Biden said.
Both candidates are making ridiculous claims that they can’t back up, showing us the kind of posturing the US, and the rest of the world, can expect for the rest of the 2020 election season. But Trump has consistently been one of the most anti-science presidents in recent history.
He has has rolled back regulations, and he even claimed that the noise from wind turbines cause cancer.
“If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 per cent in value,” Trump said during a Republican fundraiser dinner on April 3. “And they say the noise causes cancer.”
To be clear, the noise from wind turbines doesn’t cause cancer.
Trump’s neo-fascist rally included plenty of other moments that would be considered terrifyingly dystopian during any other era. Trump, who has repeatedly called journalists the “enemies of the people,” worked the crowd into a frenzy, pointing at the “fake news,” reporters and basking in the chants as the crowd screamed “CNN sucks” over and over.
The crowd also chanted “lock her up,” after Trump railed against his opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, who’s not even running in 2020.
Trump isn’t just running against Democrats in a traditional political sense. He’s campaigning on the idea that Democrats want to “destroy” America.
“The Democrats don’t care about Russia. They only care about their own political power. They went after my family, my business, my finances, my employees, almost everyone that I’ve ever known or worked with, but they are really going after you,” Trump said while gesturing to the crowd.
“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage. They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it,” Trump said.
Trump will keep making promises as the US gets closer to November 2020, but it’s as important as ever for Americans to keep an eye on what’s already being done in their name.
There’s currently a debate about what to call America’s system of concentration camps for immigrants. Some people believe that the term “concentration camp” is inaccurate, while historians and experts say that the term accurately describes what’s going on in the U.S. today. At least seven kids have died in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody since last year.
President Trump has promised to deport “millions” of migrants next week through a campaign of terror enacted by Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sending a panic through immigrant communities. And while Trump has broken plenty of promises before, all the world can do is hope that this is another one he can’t deliver on, because it only gets worse from here.
Trump supporters think that they’re immune from the pain that this president is causing on a daily basis for vulnerable people. But it’s only a matter of time before he comes for them and theirs. As Trump himself has said many times, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
We sure fucking did, you authoritarian crook. We sure fucking did.