Trump on “First Step Act” Steps on Massive Rake

Wow!

There is simply no way to spin this. Brett Baier brought real fire in the line of questions that he posed to President Trump.

This exchange is truly embarrassing.

Here’s the full statement from Pedro Gonzalez, for starters:

This exchange is simply astonishing. Trump is either too much of an imbecile to understand what Bret Baier said to him in plain English or too much of a narcissist to care that his policies enabled murderers and drug traffickers. Trump brags about how tough he would be on drug dealers if elected president again. So Baier explains to him that the First Step Act passed by Trump in 2018 actually helped drug dealers. Among other criminals, Baier mentions a member of the Latin Kings gang who got early release under the law and went on to murder a guy at a bar. Trump does not seem to understand what Baier just said to him and replies: “But I focused on non-violent crime.”

That’s not true.

In 2019, the year after Trump signed the law, Tucker Carlson reported: “Of 2,243 inmates released under the First Step Act, only 960 were incarcerated for drug-related offenses. On the other hand, 496 were in prison for weapons/explosives-related crimes, 239 for sex offenses, 178 for fraud/bribery/extortion, 118 for burglary/larceny and 106 for robbery, according to the data. Another 59 were imprisoned over homicide/aggravated assault, 46 for immigration-related offenses, nine for counterfeiting/embezzlement and two for national security reasons.” Most recently, a man who illegally immigrated to the US and was convicted of financing terrorism abroad received early release under the First Step Act. Trump either does not understand his own policies or does not care about their bad outcomes–or both.

So Trump pivots to talking about Alice Marie Johnson, who he pardoned, as an example of a Good Drug Dealer. Baier: “But she’d be killed under your [new] plan” to sentence drug dealers to death.

Trump: “Huh? . . . Oh, under that? Uhhhhhhhhh it would depend on the severity.”

Baier: “She had a multi-million dollar cocaine ring.”

For context, Johnson managed a multi-million-dollar drug ring based in Memphis, Tennessee, trafficking cocaine that originated in the hands of Colombia’s infamous Cali Cartel. Trump basically concedes that Baier is right that Johnson would receive the death penalty under his new plan, which he seemed to have completely forgotten about and doesn’t fully understand himself. Baier asks him again about the First Step Act granting leniency to drug traffickers and then Trump starts talking about pardons. This is someone who has no idea how to govern and cannot accept the fact that he made mistakes. And if Trump cannot admit fault on something like the First Step Act, he is completely incapable of leading.

This is beyond ridiculous and unserious.

Trump surrounded himself with bad people, and then he allowed them to drive the bulk of his policy agenda. That is not acceptable.

He is running a campaign on empty promises now. He says that he wants to execute drug dealers, just as the governments do in China and Singapore. However, he let some of the most egregious drug dealers get away with these heinous crimes, and he let some of the biggest merchandisers get out of jail quicker via the First Step Act.

Now, the initial version of the bill provided incentives for prisoners to get out of jail sooner. That’s a different type of reform. If federal inmates demonstrate a complete turnaround from their life of crime, if they have been transformed from the inside out, then I am all for allowing such piecemeal relaxation

Tucker Carlson was not afraid to criticize the final version of the First Step Act. He should have been more critical of President Trump himself, for once against abandoning his leadership and letting someone else run policy and legislative programs in Washington DC.

There is so much to demystify about President Trump at this point. We need to move on, and we need to move on to better results. Let’s do this!