“This is the easiest speech to make,” President Trump was saying. “We have great people. And all I’m doing is spewing off what the hell we’ve done.”
No speech is particularly hard to make for this President. He loves speaking. He would speak to an empty room, a kindergarten class, or a blank wall. In this case, he was speaking to the Detroit Economic Club after a nice tour of a Ford F-150 plant. During the tour, a Ford worker – who almost certainly no longer has a job – yelled “pedophile protector” at Trump, who yelled back “f— you” twice and flipped the guy the bird.
After that, Trump, who, after all, is just like us, headed off to talk to the swells. “Isn’t it nice to have a President who can go off teleprompter?” he said, to rousing applause, before going off on a cruel but admittedly funny Joe Biden impression.
Trump was celebrating a booming economy, a record stock market, decent inflation and jobs numbers and tariff revenue. His, he said, is the greatest Presidency ever and America is richer than it’s been since the Gilded Age.
“Even Venezuela wasn’t too bad, was it, huh? But you have Democrats who are saying, I don’t know if we should have done Venezuela, I don’t know. Anybody who’s saying that hates our country. That was as flawless an attack as there’s ever been. And they asked us to help them. They have 50 million barrels of oil. They said take it.”
But mostly, Trump said, he was here to report on “the strongest and fastest economic turnaround in our country’s history… there’s never been anything like this. You are so lucky I even allow you into this room to be with me. I’m kidding. The fake news will say, Donald Trump thinks he’s hot stuff. Right now I’m feeling pretty good though.”
Trump said his policies are the best, and that “everybody makes money with me,” before desecrating the memory of the late Jimmy Carter, criticizing him for selling the Panama Canal for one dollar. “We lost 36,000 people to the mosquito building the canal,” he said, definitely going off the prompted speech. “And a certain snake. This was a brutal reptile. You got bit and it was over. You’d say, Bye-bye everybody.”
But seriously folks, “we have the highest growth we’ve ever had,” Trump said. “Think of what we can do for the rest of it! Do we have wood around? I want to knock on wood. Everything’s plastic now.”
Not cars, though. Well, cars do contain some plastic, but there’s also a lot of high-grade steel and aluminum. And the car business is back, baby! Ford is investing in new plants in Michigan and Kentucky. Chevy has moved production from Mexico. Stellantis, which used to be Chrysler but now is at least partly owned by European interests, has agreed to invest billions in American infrastructure. Trump announced all this before going off on a five-minute diversion about men playing women’s sports, before getting back to his actual point about opening up domestic oil and gas investment.
“I love electric cars, I think they’re great,” he said. “I like Elon a lot. I don’t think he was too happy about my policy of opening it up. And I can understand that. But I was saying it for four years. They wanted everyone to have an electric car. There was no way to build the stations, there was no way to get it done. I want you to have gasoline powered cars, I want you to have electric, I want you to have hybrids.”
Overall, the President said, the economic news is damn good.
“I want you,” he said, “to have everything.”
