Trump's plane joke: It's Mexico 'getting ready to attack'

Standing before a crowd outside the shuttered Osram Sylvania light-bulb factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday, Donald Trump offered up the closed plant as a direct symptom of trade deals advocated by both Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.

He also joked that a plane flying overhead could be from Mexico and poised for attack.


Ticking through a list of statistics on jobs lost as a result of free-trade deals like NAFTA and trade normalization with China, Trump remarked, "It’s not very hard to explain. It’s not very hard to understand. What is difficult is to figure out why people did this—why. You know, we have expansion plans in this country, we have all sorts of plans, but there’s no expansion. We have job losses and other countries have massive expansion”

The factory closed in 2014 and, according to the New Hampshire Union-Leader, is set to be redeveloped into a $60 million shopping center. “So you’re looking here at a plant and the wreckage of NAFTA and the wreckage of China’s entrance into the World Trade Organizaton," Trump said.

Trump lamented trade deficits with other countries, as his campaign blasted out accompanying fact sheets sharing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

On Japan, for example, Trump said, "They send us millions of cars; we send them beef."

"Mexico, and I respect Mexico, I respect their leaders, what they’ve done to us is incredible," Trump said at the outdoor gathering, where a plane buzzed overhead. "Their leaders are so much smarter, so much sharper. And it’s incredible."

Pointing to the sky, Trump mused, "in fact, that could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to attack. So that’s the way it is, folks. I just want to say that this is a factory, and the legacy really of Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton because this legacy is largely due, you could actually say entirely due, to NAFTA."