DULUTH, Minn. – U.S. President Donald Trump may have been a stone’s throw away from Canada on Tuesday night, but made not a mention of one of his favourite sparring partners of late.
Trump instead targeted Mexico, immigrants, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats during an hour-long re-election rally in Duluth, Minn., the first visit to the city by a sitting president in 14 years.
The slogan-spouting president rallied his base with promises to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants from infiltrating through his country’s southern border, touted the return of jobs to the United States and boasted about the low unemployment rate for African Americans to the nearly all-white crowd that packed the Amsoil Arena – with hundreds more unable to enter the rink when the quickly planned event reached its capacity.
The well-trained partisan audience, in turn, responded with timely, if not tired, chants of “Lock her up,” when Trump referenced Clinton, whom he handily beat in the 2016 presidential election, “Build the wall,” when he referenced illegal immigrants and “CNN sucks,” when he pointed to the media holding pen and called them “fake news.”
Arriving about 15 minutes later than originally planned, Trump was greeted with a raucous “USA, USA, USA” cheer, and after urging the several thousand on hand to vote for a slate of Republican candidates in the November midterms, he suggested Democrats were focusing on immigration as a distraction from the recent inspector general’s report.
“They’re building up immigration because they don’t want to show what’s happening in congress now that this whole scam has been revealed,” said Trump, whose campaign is being investigated by special prosecutor Robert Mueller for possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.
Earlier in the day Trump signed an executive order ending his administration’s zero-tolerance practice of separating children from parents caught sneaking into the United States, resulting in more than 2,000 children being held in cages, sparking outrage around the world.
“As your president, I will always fight to protect American families. I will also fight for an immigration system that defends our border and takes care of the sovereignty of our nation,” Trump said. “I will never sacrifice the safety and security of the American people.
Trump promised Minnesotans he would unlock large tracts of land and make them available for resource development.
“Under the previous administration, America’s rich, natural resources, of which your state has a lot, were put under lock and key, including thousands of acres in Superior Natural Forest. Tonight I am announcing we will soon be taking the first steps to rescind the federal withdrawal in Superior National Forest … And we’ll do it carefully, and maybe, if it doesn’t pass muster, we won’t do it at all. But it is going to happen, I will tell you,” Trump said.
The president delighted the crowd by reminding them he spurred the gutting of Obamacare and how many environmental regulations his administration has overturned. He spoke of his recent meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and reiterated how unfair he believes his country has been treated on the trade front – days after threatening tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods after the Asian nation promised retaliatory tariffs against the U.S.
“As far as trade is concerned with other countries, we want fair and reciprocal trade, we don’t want stupid trade, like we had for so long,” Trump said, also threatening Mexico through NAFTA negotiations if the country doesn’t do a better job stemming the tide of would-be immigrants marching to its northern border with the U.S.
“Remember the word reciprocal. We have been ripped off by almost every single country on Earth – our friends and our enemies. And I hate to say it, but our friends do a much better job than our enemies. But those days are over,” Trump said, later attacking the European Union’s trade practices.
Two protestors were kicked out of the rally, forced to join dozens of protestors and counter-protestors outside the arena.
