Trump blasts ‘treasonous’ Dems for not applauding speech in D.C.
President Donald Trump suggested Monday that Democrats who refused to applaud during his State of the Union address last week were traitors, turning a Cincinnati speech on tax reform into a campaign rally that promised to punish Democrats in congressional elections in November.
“They would rather see Trump do badly, OK, than our country do well,” Trump said in an official visit to a suburban Cincinnati factory. “It got to the point that I didn’t really want to look too much on that side. It was bad energy.”
Trump said the Democratic response to his speech was “like death” and “un-American.”
“Somebody said ‘treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess. Why not?” he said. “Can we call that treason? Why not. They certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”
Trump’s trip to Cincinnati on Monday was billed by the White House as an official event, despite the presence of Rep. Jim Renacci, a Republican who represents the other corner of the state but is running for Senate.
“This isn’t a political event,” White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah told reporters aboard Air Force One. “The president’s there to talk about the tax cut bill that Congressman Renacci and many other Republicans in the House and Senate voted for.”
But an hour later, Trump took the stage at Sheffer Corp., a hydraulics company in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash, and went on an extended soliloquy on his Democratic opponents in Congress, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer.
Trump even tried to get out the vote for Republican candidates, a strategy usually reserved for the final days of a campaign. He said supporters of the party in power too often get complacent in the next election.
While the president has broad leeway to use his bully pulpit to talk about politics, federal laws require his party to reimburse the government for the cost of political travel. But in identifying the event as an official one, the White House signaled that the taxpayers would pick up the tab.
Trump’s political comments overshadowed what was supposed to be a policy speech highlighting his administration’s economic accomplishments.
Trump suggested that his leadership was the difference in turning around the economy.
“You know, you can work hard, but if you don’t have the right leader setting the right tone, in all fairness — I am not even saying, I am non-braggadocious,” he said. “But if I don’t set a tone, like, ‘You’re not going to keep taking our jobs,’ you’re not going to keep doing what you’re doing.”
But Trump dropped a line from his usual stump speech about the stock market as the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted nearly 1,200 points for its largest single-day point drop in history.