China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Trump vents at rivals day after acquittal
US President Donald Trump blistered his political opponents at two venues Thursday, the day after the Senate acquitted him on two articles of impeachment.
“I’ve done things wrong in my life, I will admit ... but this is what the end result is,” Trump said in the East Room of the White House, holding up a copy of The Washington Post with the headline “Trump acquitted”.
“It’s the only good headline I’ve ever had in The Washington Post,” Trump said.
The newspaper, owned by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, incidentally, is one to which a White House subscription (along with The New York Times) would not be renewed, the administration said in October.
About an hour before the speech, which was scheduled for 12 pm, photojournalists and camerapersons who had set up in the East Room were asked to move out for a change in the seating arrangement to accommodate as many guests as possible.
Trump said at the beginning of his speech that he had invited some of his “very good friends”, and the room is limited, but “everybody wanted to come. We kept it down to a minimum.”
The “minimum” actually was the maximum capacity of the East Room, which is about 80 feet long by 37 feet wide.
Trump’s slightly more than hourlong speech was mostly offthe-cuff, with Trump referring only to notes of talking points, without a teleprompter. Trump made clear he was not giving a speech. “It’s not anything. It’s just we’re sort of — it’s a celebration.”
The president used most of the speech to thank his supporters in the Senate and House and his legal team for the trial. But he didn’t limit his vitriol to impeachment.
Trump railed against the nearly two-year-long investigation by former US special counsel Robert Mueller of alleged Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
“And you have to understand, we first went through Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump said. “It was all bull----.We then went through the Mueller report. And they should have come back one day later.
They didn’t. They came back two years later, after lives were ruined, after people went bankrupt, after people lost all their money.”
Trump also criticized former FBI director James Comey, whom he fired in May 2017 after a memo of a conversation Trump had with him in February 2017 was leaked.
“Had I not fired James Comey … I wouldn’t even be standing here right now,” Trump said. “Dirty cops. Bad people. If this happened to President Obama, a lot of people would have been in jail for a long time already.”
The Republican-controlled Senate on Wednesday voted to acquit Trump on charges brought by the Democratic-led House of Representatives, the third time an American president has been impeached.
Earlier Thursday, Trump spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, a historically bipartisan event that also was attended by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He criticized those who invoked religion during the impeachment saga.
Pelosi, a Catholic who opened the impeachment inquiry in September, said in December that she prays for Trump.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a Mormon, cited his faith when he voted to convict Trump on the charge of abuse of power. Romney was the only Republican to vote for conviction. No Democrat voted to acquit. Romney did vote for acquittal on the obstruction of Congress count.
“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” Trump said at the breakfast as Pelosi sat nearby on the stage. “Nor do I like people who say ‘I pray for you’, when they know that that’s not so.”
Trump, who has solid backing from evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics, referred to the issue again in the East Room: “I doubt she (Pelosi) prays at all.”
At a news conference afterward, the speaker said: “He’s talking about things he knows little about — faith and prayer.”
The discord between Trump and Pelosi reached a crescendo Tuesday evening when Trump gave his State of the Union address. Pelosi did not introduce the president with the traditional, ceremonial pomp, and Trump subsequently turned his back on the San Francisco Democrat after she extended her hand.
About an hour and a half later, after Trump concluded his address, Pelosi was seen tearing her copy of the speech into pieces.
House Democrats on Thursday rejected a Republican-supported resolution to condemn Pelosi for ripping up the speech, by a 224193 vote along party lines.
The drama has intensified the gulf between Republicans and Democrats nine months before the US presidential election, in which Trump will attempt to be the first impeached president to be re-elected.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, said Thursday: “Instead of selfvictimizing and self-aggrandizing, instead of being spiteful and vindictive, President Trump could have used his nationally televised speech to show some contrition and unite the nation.”
In the East Room speech, which was interrupted several times by applause and laughter, Trump also said that Representative Adam Schiff, the House Democrat from California who led the impeachment effort, was a “vicious, horrible person”.
Near the end of his speech, Trump hugged his daughter Ivanka and the first lady for standing by him.
Senate Republicans voted to acquit Trump of abuse of power for pressing Ukraine to investigate former vice-president Joe Biden, who is running to be the Democratic nominee to face Trump on Nov 3, and of obstructing a congressional investigation of the matter.
Going forward, Democrats have suggested they might subpoena John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, to testify to House committees.
Senate Republicans rejected Democratic efforts to subpoena Bolton to testify during the trial.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday showed that Americans were evenly split, mostly along party lines, over the acquittal. The national opinion poll found that 43 percent of US adults supported the Senate’s decision to keep Trump in office. Fortyone percent opposed the acquittal, and 17 percent reported they were undecided.