President Barack Obama is out of his depth when it comes to negotiating a way out of the debt ceiling crisis, billionaire developer Donald Trump tells Newsmax.TV in a typically candid, no-holds-barred exclusive interview.
And Republican negotiators hold all the cards in the talks, he adds. They are in a no-lose situation where they can either extract a great deal from the administration, or they can delay a decision so the president has to take his unpopular stance up again just before the election.
The only thing the GOP negotiators can do wrong is make concessions just to get a deal through Congress, he said.
“Obama’s totally lost,” Trump said. “He’s obviously not somebody who’s made a lot of deals in his life.
“The man is not a man who makes deals. The one deal he made was Obamacare and that’s a disaster for the country.”
Trump was speaking just a week before Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s August 2 deadline day, which he said is not an important date.
Trump said the president is trying to scare people when he talks about a possible default if a deal is not reached by then. “The administration doesn’t want this dialogue to go on much longer because it hurts Obama.
“Look at his popularity. It’s going way down. People are saying he’s got no control over the situation, he’s got no control over the economy, he’s got no control over the country and he’s the president. This is turning out to be Jimmy Carter-esque.”
But the August 2 date is meaningless, he said. “Monday of this week, everything was supposed to crash in Asia and it didn’t,” said the Trump, who earlier this year mulled running for the Republican nomination for president.
“It was supposed to crash throughout the world but it didn’t.
“That threat is highly overblown, and August 2 is no longer the date. There’s plenty of funds to keep it going quite a bit longer. That’s just a date that Geithner came up with mysteriously, so August 2 is not a real threat at all.”
He said Rep. John Boehner and other GOP negotiators are on the right track when it comes to dealing with the debt and deficit crises. “Right now he’s doing fine, but he’s got to stay the course. He cannot fold. This is the time to make a great deal for the country.”
And that deal, he said, should include a repeal of the president’s healthcare initiative, which he said will do untold damage to the economy if it is ever fully implemented.
“It would be a great time to get rid of the really terrible thing called Obamacare,” Trump said. “It’s going to cost tremendous amounts of jobs. I know people that are going to close their businesses over Obamacare, so in the mix, they really should start thinking about getting rid of Obamacare.”
He agreed with Republicans that the most important thing in any final deal is to cut federal spending. “if you don’t cut expenses, we’ll never be in a position to be a great country again.“
“The Republicans are on the right track, I only hope that they continue on this track. They have to get the 100 percent deal because they have all the cards. If they don’t get the100 percent deal, they should delay it or not make a deal at all.”
He said the Republicans are in such a powerful position in the debt ceiling talks that they should either make a great deal or not make one at all. But he warned, “If you make a great deal, Obama’s actually going to end up being much tougher to beat in an election.
The option, he said, would be to delay everything for up to a year. “If that happens, Obama cannot be reelected.”
Trump claimed the debt crisis battle had turned America into “a laughing stock all over the world,” and now it’s for the Republicans to do a deal to “bring the country back to the greatness it once had.”
But he said the long-running talks will not necessarily lead to a massive stock market sell-off as has been claimed. “Nothing is inevitable,” he said. “If the right deal is made, you’ll have a big uptick on Wall Street.
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