Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to rip former President Donald Trump for his double talk about getting Mexico to build a border wall.
DeSantis War Room, the Republican governor’s social media rapid response team, posted a clip on Saturday of DeSantis reminding voters that Trump said he would get America’s southern neighbor to fund construction of the wall — and not just a “piece” of it.
DeSantis has criticized Trump for saying in recent weeks that he had no legal “instrument” to force Mexico to pay for the border barrier.
Yet Fortune magazine reported in 2018 — after Trump reiterated that year that Mexico “is paying for the wall” as part of the deal to replace the NAFTA trade agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico — the then-president had made that claim on social media, in interviews, and at press conferences and campaign rallies at least 20 times since April 2015.
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Yet two weeks ago, during a campaign stop in Iowa, Trump told the crowd, “So with all those losers out there that say – ‘Trump never got the –’ you remember, I used to say, ‘Mexico will pay for the piece of the wall.’”
“I’ll say, ‘What’s gonna happen if they [Mexico] fight,’ I say, ‘The wall gets higher.’ We all had a lot of fun. But I said, ‘Mexico will pay, for a piece of the wall.’ Well, there was no legal instrument to do that,” Trump added.
But on Saturday, DeSantis reminded Iowa voters that was not his promise.
“We are actually going to build the border wall,” DeSantis said, and I will actually have Mexico pay for it.”
“You know, that was promised years ago,” DeSantis added, recalling that he attended Trump rallies in 2016 when the then-candidate repeatedly pledged Mexico’s support. “He said that very clearly.”
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“Now, he says … there was no legal mechanism I could have used to make Mexico pay for the wall. Wait a minute. That’s not what you said then.”
“Do you remember him saying only a piece of the wall,” the governor continued.
“Don’t whiz on my leg and tell me that it’s raining, okay?!”
DeSantis noted that Trump, even more recently, is claiming that the wall was built and Mexico did pay for it.
Yet, if that was true, he noted, America would not have been overrun by 8 million illegal immigrants under an “open borders” president like Joe Biden. The wall, said DeSantis, “is a physical fact of life.”
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