Businessman and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is scheduled to visit the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday.
“I’ve been invited by the border patrols, and they want to honor me, actually, and thousands and thousands of ’em, because I’m speaking up,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday on “Fox and Friends.” “These are tremendous people. These are tough people. They want to do the job, and they’re not allowed to do their job by the president, essentially. They’re not allowed to do their job.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign released an itinerary for the trip soon after the television appearance.
“I’ll be flying in. And I may never see you again, but we’re going to do it,” he said.
Mr. Trump has received pushback for saying in his presidential announcement speech last month that Mexico is sending criminals into the U.S. He has since said his remarks have been misconstrued and that he was referring to the Mexican government, not the country’s people, and that people who had initially criticized him are now telling him, off-the-record, that he was right.
At the same time, he has also shot to first in a new poll on the GOP field. Asked if he was going to change how he is campaigning, he said: “I have to be myself.”
“Look, [I’ve] built a great company, a great empire. It’s [a] phenomenal success, you saw the filings last week,” Mr. Trump said. “What I’ve done is successful. I mean, ’The Apprentice’ became one of the most successful shows on television. Now watch it go down the tubes. I told NBC I wouldn’t do it because I’m doing this. I gave up a lot of money.”
“The fact is that we have to make our country great again,” he continued. “I don’t want to read teleprompters. Reading teleprompters would be much easier. I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I was a good student. Reading teleprompters is easy, but you don’t learn about a person. I watch our president constantly reading teleprompters and look what we got. We got a president that doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“No, I can’t change. I don’t need every time I say something to hire a pollster like [Jeb] Bush, where Bush went out — it took him five days to tell whether or not Iraq was a good thing. He went out and polled the answer. I don’t want to do that, because that’s not real,” Mr. Trump said.
Asked who is real and who in the Republican field could be a good partner, he said: “Donald Trump is real.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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