It can be quite a trip when Trump visits
Presidential visits have such fun rules. The night before President Donald Trump’s trip Wednesday to the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center — better known as the Lima tank plant — the White House press office set up a background call.
Rule No. 1: The Trump assistant delivering the briefing could be identified only as a “senior administration official” — not uncommon in Washington, although Trump has railed against news stories citing anonymous sources.
The official talked about the significance of Trump’s visit to the Lima facility and how it fit with trade and manufacturing policy.
We’re not going to break the rules, but the next day, there was an op-ed in The New York Times on the significance of Trump’s visit to the Lima facility by a senior administration official, Peter Navarro, Trump’s director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. Back to the pen
Then there are the rules at the visit site.
The Dispatch wanted to talk to workers at the Lima plant, and found a group of enthusiastic Trump supporters sitting in the front row who worked together assembling the eight-wheeled Stryker infantry carrier vehicle.
After a couple of minutes of conversation, and almost three hours before Trump arrived, a Trump official came up and politely said interviews aren’t allowed during the president’s visits, and all reporters were to be confined to the press pen for the duration of the event.
Other Trump tidbits
Unlike typical Trump rallies, the reaction of the Lima audience of mostly tank plant workers was reserved for the most part — including dead silence during most of his five-minute diatribe against the late Republican Sen. John Mccain of Arizona.
One remark that did draw loud cheers and applause came when a worker called to the stage told Trump: “It is my personal opinion that God was looking after our country when you were elected.”
Trump ridiculed Hillary Clinton for emphasizing the potential of wind power. “If you’re in sight of a windmill, watch the value of your house go down by 65 percent.”
And several times he held up colored charts on 8-by11 pieces of paper that were impossible to see for most of the nearly 1,000 there. Finally he said, “You don’t have to know what’s on it. What’s the difference?”
What about this?
During the 50-minute speech, Trump offered up several factually challenged statements about Mccain and other topics.
So what about his assertion about the locale of a northeastern Ohio auto plant GM shut down earlier this month: “Lordstown is a great area. I guess I like it because I won so big there.”
That one checks out. He topped Hillary Clinton by 400 votes in the three-precinct Trumbull County village in 2016, besting the Democrat by nearly 22 percentage points.
Admission? A year’s salary
Speaking of Lordstown, during Trump’s Lima visit, David Miller, director of communication for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund, issued a release saying “Trump’s Canton fundraiser dinner will cost $50,000 per person to attend, just $3,523 less than the average household income in Lordstown at $53,523.” Could that be true? Dispatch reporter Randy Ludlow looked at the official stats, and found that both figures were accurate.
The rest of the story
One of the speakers warming up the crowd before Trump’s tank plant talk was Lt. Gov. Jon Husted. “As president, he’s done so many things to help this state,” Husted said.
“Certainly, on the military front, the president has been incredible, from Camp (James A.) Garfield near Youngstown to Wright-patterson Air Force Base near Dayton.”
What Husted didn’t mention was that both of those military facilities could take a multimillion-dollar hit under the Pentagon’s list of possible funding sources to pay for Trump’s national emergency-causing border wall.
The Camp Garfield Joint Military Training Center (actually closer to Ravenna) could lose $7.4 million slated for a new automated multipurpose machine gun range. Wright-patt, Ohio’s largest single-site employer, could say goodbye to nearly $68 million, mostly for a National Air and Space Intelligence Center at the base.
drowland@dispatch.com @darreldrowland