Donald Trump: 'You have to be wealthy in order to be great'

Donald Trump at a rally in Montana on Thursday.

(Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

published 27 May 2016

If you want to be great, you don't need to have integrity, strength, courage, or grace — as long as you've got money, you're good to go.

So says Donald Trump, who dropped this truth bomb during a campaign rally Thursday in Bismarck, North Dakota. "There's one more thing that we must do to make America wealthy again, and you have to be wealthy in order to be great, I'm sorry to say," he said, in a sound bite that's sure to make its way into a Hillary Clinton ad someday soon.

Trump also brought up crime, which he says is going up in major cities across the United States, a development that is "totally unacceptable." He called crime a "stealth tax, it's a stealth tax on the poor," and said it "undermines their schools, slashes the value of their homes, and drives away their jobs." But Trump has a message for "those living in fear. I say: Help is coming, it's coming soon. A Trump administration will return law and order to America." Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.