President Trump traveled to Ohio Thursday to give what was supposed to be a speech touting his administration’s infrastructure plan, as the White House attempts this week to refocus on infrastructure for the umpteenth time since Trump’s inauguration. But that effort ran aground Thursday for the same reason Trump’s other infrastructure weeks have failed to make a splash: Infrastructure is a relatively boring subject, and Trump wouldn’t be caught dead giving a boring speech.
At his speech in Ohio, Trump made a few remarks on infrastructure, saying his plan would “transform our roads and bridges from a source of endless frustration into a source of incredible pride” while admitting that “you’re probably going to have to wait until after the election” to see it passed.
But Trump used the majority of his time to wander through one of his signature stream-of-consciousness rants, quickly abandoning the topic of infrastructure to muse about foreign policy, immigration, his Wednesday decision to fire Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin, and the relaunch of Roseanne.
“Look at Roseanne. Look at her ratings,” Trump said of the latter, in which Barr’s character is a Trump supporter. “They were unbelievable. Over 18 million people. And it was about us.”
Trump has gotten into trouble in past speeches for his jabs at his opponents, as when he called Democrats “treasonous” and “un-American” for declining to applaud during his State of the Union address. Thursday was no different: Trump seemed to accuse Democrats of wanting drugs to continue flowing illegally into America from Mexico.
“They want people to come in from the border, and they want, I guess—I can’t imagine they want, but certainly drugs are pouring across our borders. We need walls,” Trump said. “We started building our wall. I am so proud of it.”
(Never mind that the comments about building the wall refer to a section of existing border fencing being replaced, a project that began years ago.)
Other topics Trump touched on included Syria—”we’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon”—a potential meeting with Kim Jong-un—”if it’s no good, we’re walking, and if it’s good we will embrace it”—and why America should have seized the Middle East’s oil when they had the chance.
“If we kept the oil, we would’ve been OK. If we kept the oil, we wouldn’t have ISIS,” Trump said. “They kept the oil, we didn’t keep the oil! Stupid! Stupid!”
On the plane to Ohio, White House officials gave reporters a rundown of what Trump intended to talk about, calling infrastructure “the next piece of the president’s economic agenda” and touting a report from the Council of Economic Advisers that indicated Trump’s plan “could add between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points to the average real GDP growth every year for 10 years.”
