Billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump says no matter the outcome of the final debt-ceiling votes the process has been “an embarrassment" to the nation. Trump also said on Fox Business News Monday that he has great respect for the tea party movement, which pushed President Barack Obama and the Democrats to consider serious spending cuts.
“It’s a great embarrassment, the whole process, to this country — we used to be a leader, we used to be considered a great country — and today, everyone’s talking about China and other countries and they’re not talking about us in the same breath,” Trump told Fox’s Neal Cavuto. “It’s pretty sad what’s happened — I mean, if you look at what’s gone on with the United States, we’re no longer respected — and then, you take a mess like they’re doing in Washington, whether they get it passed or not.”
Cavuto noted that although some might consider the $2 trillion in cuts being considered under the deal a paltry figure, without GOP pressure the figure would probably have been considerably lower. Trump credited the tea party.
“I have great respect for the people in the tea party because they’re really the ones who got this thing going and I love them because they’ve made people think and they’re looking at $15 trillion in debt and they’re looking at all the problems,” Trump said. “We’re going to have $22 trillion very soon even with all of this that they’re doing — so I really respect what the tea party has done.”
Trump, however, expressed amazement the GOP agreed that elements of the deal will remain in effect until past the 2012 election.
“If this would have come up sometime prior to the presidential election, Obama could not have been re-elected — and I can’t believe they allowed that one point,” he said. “The only thing that Obama really fought for was to get . . . [it] sometime past the election and it looks like he won that — and that’s amazing that the Republicans would have agreed to it.”
Cavuto asked Trump about the possibility of a downgrade in the United States credit rating.
“Well, I have a whole thing about the ratings agencies. These ratings agencies sit there like they're God and they — look who was worse than the ratings agencies with the problem we had four years ago?” Trump said. “They mis-rated every single instrument that they looked at and now, all of sudden, everyone’s looking to the rating agencies.
“I mean, I think the rating agencies should be totally discredited because if you look at what they did with mortgages and all of the other problems that we had four years ago that caused — that really cost us, I mean, a lot of problems — it caused a world of problems,” he said. “I think it would be a shame — but I think they should be ashamed of themselves. I have a feeling there’s a lot of pressure on the agencies not to do anything — I would think there’s some political pressure. Even though they say they don't succumb to that — I think they do.”
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