All quotes are taken from Charlie Kirk unless otherwise specified.
Background
This video is of Charlie Kirk debating a college student.
Analysis
Here I will look at certain statements I take issue with for the following reasons:
- Logical fallacy
- Factually incorrect
- Bad faith
- Simple mistake
- etc.
Statement
Do you vote for people or for policies?(Charlie Kirk 1:03)
Critique
Potential fallacy: Complex question
There seems to be a small assumption that these two reasons for voting for a candidate are either mutually exclusive at worst or disconnected at best. However, these two aspects of a candidate are equally important for determining the President.
A candidates personal life and backstory and very much affect how they carry themselves and, therefore, affect their policy decisions. Their mentality and actions help setup what kind of person the candidate really is and can sometimes be used to find out whether they are a hypocrite or not, and how much of one they are compared to the opposition.
Statement
The numbers [of] the border crossings were down to record lows now they’re to 15,000 a day so you can’t possibly say they’re the same.(Charlie Kirk 1:55)
Critique
They are not “border crossings” but rather border encounters. This distinction is important because under Biden, the number of people turned away from the border was 1.1 million and 2 million were apprehended in 2021 alone.
Statement
So Tom Homan, who is Barack Obama’s border Chief 20 years in the position, said Donald Trump was the best on the border of any president he ever served under, so you can’t compare those two.(Charlie Kirk 2:01)
Critique
Just because an individual liked a president’s job on a particular issue does not mean that the president was actually good at effectuating a good outcome to the issue. It could be that the president was also either poor at their job or was simply ineffective and other circumstances affected the outcome that were more dominate than what the president could do.
Statement
On the economy, everyone would here agree the economy was better under Donald Trump than Joe Biden, everyone would agree they would say that higher wages, prices were more affordable, the economy was more stable, period.(Charlie Kirk 2:13)
Critique
Potential fallacy: Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
Just because something was a particular way under a certain president, does not necessarily mean that the president was the one who affected the outcome of the thing itself. It could be the case that some external issue was causing said problem to get worse and the president then may not be the one responsible, or at least the one that should take the plurality of the blame for it. After all, Donald Trump’s economy crashed in 2020, but that was primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, not from Trump’s policies.
Statement
On wars, how many new wars started under Donald Trump?—How many under Joe Biden?(Charlie Kirk 2:25)
Critique
Similar to the last point, a president cannot affect everything that can possibly affect a particular issue and sometimes it may be out of their control.
For example, the Russo–Ukrainian war started while Joe Biden was president, but that doesn’t mean that his presidency caused the war to occur.
Statement
You know the Israel peace deal that he signed between the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel? He signed the Abraham Accords which was the greatest peace deal of Israel in the modern lifetime.(Charlie Kirk 3:00)
Critique
This peace deal was unnecessary since there was no on-going conflict between the countries involved. They may have had some hostilities towards each other, but referring it as “the greatest peace deal of Israel in the modern lifetime” is a stretch. Especially now that it didn’t prevent future conflicts between Israel and Palestine, who is more supported by the Muslim world and something Donald Trump did not tackle during is presidency, making it arguably ineffective at preventing future conflicts.
Statement
Donald Trump prevented Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine.(Charlie Kirk 3:10)
Critique
Again, like one of the previous points, there’s nothing to indicate that the Russo–Ukrainian war could have been stopped simply by having a different president in office. Neither Donald Trump or Joe Biden would have ever deployed any American troops in the war and there would be no other actualized obstruction for Russia to not go into war under Trump.
Statement
Vladimir Putin did not move an inch into Ukraine you know where he did move an inch into Ukraine? Under Obama and he annexed Crimea. Under Biden he invaded Ukraine, not under Trump he wouldn’t dare, you know why, he also feared Trump.
(Charlie Kirk 3:28)
Critique
Russia was already funding militia groups throughout Donald Trump’s tenor as president and never mentioned to Putin to stop or threatened him with any punishment, military or economic. Russia invading Ukraine was simply a logical extension of the already occurring war in the Donbass and Luhansk regions of Ukraine that Russia was funding. And again, as it must be said, correlation does not equal causation. There is also nothing to suggest that Putin feared Trump.
Statement
Donald Trump threated to bombing the Kremlin if Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. He was so crazy that Vladimir Putin basically believed him.(Charlie Kirk 3:50)
Critique
Not only would this be an insane suggestion on the presidents part, implicating a start to a WWIII, but it there is no evidence of the comment ever being made.
Statement
The blue collar workers, we saw blue collar boom under Donald Trump, working class people saw the greatest rise to their wages in 20 years under Donald Trump.
(Charlie Kirk 4:25)
Critique
The years following the Obama Administration, the First Trump Administration continued with the same rate of wage growth, showing no noticeable signs of the rate increasing or decreasing under Trump. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Donald Trump did see the highest growth of wages in the past 20 years, but only for an extremely short period of time due to massive layoffs from the COVID-19 pandemic. This has slowly fell back down after the pandemic and is almost back to normal levels.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth#:~:text=Wages%20in%20the%20United%20States,percent%20in%20April%20of%202020.
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2024/04/trump-president-real-wages-inflation-hovde-baldwin-fact-brief/
I’m not sure what Charlie Kirk means when he is referring to a “blue collar boom,” since all I could find online was a potential blue collar boom under Joe Biden, but I do not know if Biden’s policies likely caused this or if it is simply a coincidence. If anything, I found the opposite to be true under Trump, with many critiquing him on his claims of a “blue collar boom” under his presidency.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-state-of-the-union-declared-were-in-a-blue-collar-boom-workers-dont-agree/
https://www.epi.org/blog/trumps-blue-collar-boom-state-of-the-union/
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/blue-collar-boom-college-grads-baby-boomers-big-winners-in-trumps-economy-idUSKBN2011AQ/
https://umbc.edu/stories/real-pay-data-show-trumps-blue-collar-boom-is-more-of-a-bust-for-us-workers-in-3-charts/
Statement
He did a tax cut on for working men and women, he deregulated the economy, and he also restricted the labor supply by brining in less foreign labor which therefore raises wages for working men and women in this country.
4:40