Donald Trump, the first former U.S. president ever convicted on 34 felony counts, faced a torrent of scorn and ridicule after he declared, “A criminal is a criminal, they generally stay a criminal,” during a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota on Saturday.
Alternative headline: Trump finally tells the truth about something.
This is lacking context. He was paraphrasing something I believe is implied to have been said (or at least believed) by Bukele(the president of El Salvador)
Trump was talking about this country dumping all their criminals in the USA. He said:
"He liked to say he did something with a social experiment. A criminal is a criminal as they generally say a criminal and we don’t have time to figure it out, but we’re not going to take criminals and we’re going to get rid of the criminals that we've been given by all these countries from all over the world."
Now if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt and interpret that "criminal is a criminal" line as something he is quoting from someone else, you go right ahead. I do not give him the benefit of the doubt though. Even if he is quoting someone else, he is not disputing the point. He appears to be accepting it as fact and his response is that he's going to get rid of those criminals.
/Apologies for deleting and then un-deleting, I hit enter too soon while transcribing and wanted to avoid confusion.
Yeah that's fair, I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt so much as just how I heard it(based on his voice, he wasn't talking normally- instead he sounded like he was quoting), but there's definitely two possible ways to interpret it.