Manhattan advertising mogul Donny Deutsch claimed on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe‘ on Thursday that Donald Trump aims to exploit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to manipulate news coverage and will also unleash the military upon the American people, among other outlandish claims.
Deutsch, a regular show participant, suggested that if Trump wins the election, he will have the FCC report directly to him to manage news programs’ coverage. “He says what he’s going to do. What he’s going to do to your point, Joe, is have the FCC report to him so he will be able to control shows like this. He wants the FCC to report to him,” Deutsch said.
Pointing to a recent interview Trump gave to TIME magazine’s Eric Cortellesa, Deutsch also claimed, “He wants to bring the Insurrection Act back so he can turn military troops on his own people. He wants to weaponize, as you said, the Justice Department to go after his enemies,” Deutsch continued. He then bizarrely claimed that Trump “wants to put women on a registry in red states for abortion.”
WHAT TRUMP ACTUALLY SAID.
In January, Trump lashed out at CNN and NBC for refusing to cover his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses. However, he never suggested using the FCC to control the media. “NBC and CNN refused to air my victory speech. I think of it because they are crooked. They’re dishonest, and frankly, they should have their licenses or whatever they have. Take it away,” Trump said.
Deutsch’s allegations regarding Trump’s recent TIME interview are simply not true either. In the interview, Trump expressed his intention to use the military, mainly the National Guard, if possible, to go after and detain illegal aliens — not American citizens.
Writes Cortellessa: “For an operation of that scale, Trump says he would rely mostly on the National Guard to round up and remove undocumented migrants throughout the country. ‘If they weren’t able to, then I’d use [other parts of] the military,’ he says. When I ask if that means he would override the Posse Comitatus Act—an 1878 law that prohibits the use of military force on civilians—Trump seems unmoved by the weight of the statute. ‘Well, these aren’t civilians,’ he says. ‘These are people that aren’t legally in our country.'”
Furthermore, while he expressed his belief that it would be acceptable for states with anti-abortion laws to prosecute women who violate them, he never once made mention of a registry, let alone wanting to put women on one.
“More than 20 states now have full or partial abortion bans, and Trump says those policies should be left to the states to do what they want, including monitoring women’s pregnancies,” Cortellessa writes. “’I think they might do that,’ he says. When I ask whether he would be comfortable with states prosecuting women for having abortions beyond the point the laws permit, he says, ‘It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.'”
