Donald Trump stopped by the Faith and Family Conference Friday evening to drop more hints about an independent run for the White House, while questioning the veracity of President Obama’s longform birth certificate and taking on GOP leadership over its approach to disaster relief funds.
“Representative [Eric] Cantor, who I like, said we don’t want to give money to the tornado victims,” Trump said. “And yet in Afghanistan we’re spending $10 billion a month. But we don’t want to help the people that got devastated by tornadoes. Wiped out, killed, maimed, injured — we don’t have money for them but we’re spending $10 billion a month in Afghanistan.”
Trump wasn’t done.
“We’re spending billions of dollars in Iraq,” he said. “We’re spending billions of billions of dollars and we can’t help people that got flooded by the Mississippi, that got hit horribly by the tornadoes.”
That made him the second speaker at the FFC to take on Cantor over his requirement that any relief funds sent to disaster victims like those in Joplin, MO be paid for by spending cuts before it gets doled out. Earlier Friday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) criticized Cantor for the same stance.
Here’s what Cantor’s office told TPM in response to Barbour’s comments:
A spokesman for Cantor noted to TPM that there were instances under the Republican Congresses of the 1990s in which disaster relief was offset elsewhere, including supplemental assistance to Oklahoma City in the wake of a terrorist attack by Timothy McVeigh.
As for the release of Obama’s longform birth certificate, which Trump took credit for, the Apprentice host said the new information hasn’t answered his questions about Obama’s origin.
“I don’t know exactly what he showed,” he said. “Someday, someone’s going to figure that one out.”
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