Donald Trump is not known for his razor wit. You would be hard-pressed to find an instance of thoughtful, incisive discourse ever coming out of his mouth. His arguments are the equivalent of a five-year-old on a sugar high bashing a pinata at a birthday party.
His stance on minimum wage has been equally blunt and unsubtle: it should be low.
Trump’s minimum wage argument has always been something along lines of making American wages competitive in a global economy:
“We can’t have a situation where our labor is so much more expensive than other countries that we can no longer compete. One of the things I’ll do if I win, I’ll make us competitive as a country.”
(Of course, the huge problem with that is that, in Trump’s argument, American workers are “competing” against workers making a pittance being forced to work 12-hour days for 18 days in a row in military barrack-like environments. So his argument has zero validity. But I digress.)
Enter Bernie Sanders, totally owning Trump on his complete lack of logic:
“This is a guy who does not want to raise the minimum wage. In fact, he has said that he thinks wages in America are too high. But he does want to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top three-tenths of 1%.”
He continued:
“That’s not an agenda that ‘makes America great.’ It’s just another Republican billionaire wanting to make the very rich richer at the expense of working families.”
Boom. Drop mic. Walk off stage.
Trump responded in typical sledgehammer fashion on Twitter.
.@BernieSanders-who blew his campaign when he gave Hillary a pass on her e-mail crime, said that I feel wages in America are too high. Lie!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2015
Apparently, having decided that he hadn’t stuck his foot far enough into his mouth, Trump continued:
Wages in are country are too low, good jobs are too few, and people have lost faith in our leaders.We need smart and strong leadership now!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2015
“Smart and strong leadership:” sounds like a Bernie endorsement to me!
Trump has always counted on a support base consisting of working-class, relatively uneducated, relatively racist white people. So his challenge is to try to maintain the support of the people who are most harmed by the low minimum wages he proposes.
Now that Sanders has begun courting Trump’s supporters, Trump is tripping over his feet to keep them. And because he lacks any ability to be subtle, Trump does a complete about-face on the minimum wage issue.
By pushing Trump into this minimum-wage ballet of words, Sanders is showing the weakness and lack of conviction in Trump’s stances. Hopefully Trump’s support base will see it too.
