It appears that Donald Trump literally doesn’t known the meaning of “sacrifice.”
“I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.”
Really? Importing foreign workers to depress wages was a sacrifice for him? The only plausible justification for this statement is that Trump believes he sacrificed his integrity when he affirmed to the U.S. government that he was simply unable to find Americans to work for him. But that’s unlikely, since it supposes that Trump had integrity.
More to the point, there’s nothing about having employees that constitutes “sacrifice.” There’s plenty of ways an employer might sacrifice for employees — most obviously extending pay or benefits above that required to keep a staff, or reducing business profits to avoid layoffs during a downturn. There are numerous CEOs who have returned their pay to the company, and business owners who have offered stock ownership to employees. But Donald Trump hasn’t offered any of those actions as examples of sacrifices. Whether he has ever taken them is unknown.
He also observed:
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”
Let’s leave aside that Mrs. Kahn’s silence is probably preferable to delivering a speech someone else delivered four years prior. Trump’s comment is a reflection of so much that is wrong with Trump’s behavior: He makes wild, unfounded accusations that he says “people are talking” about. He doesn’t take responsibility for the statements — he’s just saying what he’s hearing, he says. Leave it to someone else to determine whether the statements are accurate.
So in Trump’s world, American Muslims celebrated on September 11, Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK, and Mrs. Kahn was gagged at the DNC. But none of those things happened in our world. Perhaps Trump should be president of the world he imagines, but not the one we live in.