Did Donald Trump Just Outright Lie About His ‘Stop And Frisk’ Comments?

On Wednesday, after Donald Trump’s “core black issues” town hall event in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the big story coming out of the event was that he advocated for a nationwide “stop-and-frisk” campaign to deal with “black-on-black crime. It was not clear if Trump had any knowledge that such programs have been ruled unconstitutional, in large part because they target minorities who are completely innocent on top of not working in the first place. However, on a “Fox and Friends” appearance Thursday morning, presumably in light of the response, Trump started to backpedal dramatically on the stance (the stop-and-frisk comments are at 3:35 of the embedded video):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHEqvgHwcP4

Now Chicago is out of control. And I was really referring to Chicago with stop-and-frisk. They asked me about Chicago, and I was talking about stop-and-frisk for Chicago. And where you had 3,000 shootings this year. 3,000 from January 1st. And obviously you can’t let the system go the way it’s going but I suggested stop-and-frisk and some people think that’s a great idea and some probably don’t like it. But when you have 3,000 people shot and so many people are dying, I mean, it’s worse than some of the places we’re hearing about, like Afghanistan, you know the war-torn nations. I mean, it’s more dangerous.

But when that he was asked about “stop-and-frisk” for Chicago, that’s actually not true. Yes, Trump’s response did include the statement “I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago. However, according to the transcription by Fox News’s Chris Snyder, the audience member never actually asked about Chicago in his question:

I had a question about, there’s been a lot of violence in the black community — I want to know, what would you do to stop that violence, you know, black-on-black crime…

As noted, they were not in Chicago, so the question could not have been about Chicago. There is literally no other way to take his response since, in this morning’s interview, he was being asked about stop-and-frisk in the context of yesterday’s town hall in Cleveland Heights.

[Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.