Either President Trump knows something we don't, or he overlooked the slave trade during his speech Friday in New York about the MS-13 gang. While addressing service members on Long Island, Trump claimed that human trafficking "is worse now maybe than it's ever been in the history of the world," even when slavery was legal.
"You go back a thousand years, when you think of human trafficking, you go back 500 years, 200 years, a hundred years," Trump said, discussing human traffickers, which he referred to as "new words" that "we haven't heard too much of."
Human trafficking undoubtedly remains a serious problem in this day and age, but Trump's comparison misses the mark: Last year in the U.S., 7,500 cases of human trafficking were reported. An estimated 12.5 million were displaced during the transatlantic slave trade. Becca Stanek
The Week
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Editor's note: As some readers have pointed out, Trump was not wrong. Many experts estimate that worldwide, more people are enslaved today than ever before.
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