US President Donald Trump on Saturday rallied right-wing advocates with a speech offering conservative red meat on immigration, trade and the threat of “socialism” as he sought to move on from a bruising week in domestic and international politics.
“We believe in the American dream, not in the socialist nightmare,” he said to boisterous applause from hundreds of supporters at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington.
“America will never be a socialist country,” Trump added in a mammoth two-hour speech that seemed to draw energy from the fervent reception offered by some of his influential supporters in the room.
It was his first public appearance since coming home empty-handed, and to criticism from all sides, after a nuclear-disarmament summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
The White House is also smarting from explosive testimony on Capitol Hill by Trump’s former lawyer and fixer on Wednesday that branded him a cheat and a racist.
Trump, often speaking in mocking tones, portrayed the Green New Deal climate strategy touted by the left of the Democratic Party as a socialist plan that would devastate the fossil-fuel and automotive industries.
Progressive healthcare policies would “lead to colossal tax increases,” he said.
With a federal investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia reportedly approaching its conclusion, Trump again berated special counsel Robert Mueller’s team as partisan hacks out to get him, adding that “these people are sick.”
His voice dripping with sarcasm, he suggested that his call in summer of 2016 for Russia to find and release former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mails was a joke that had been obtusely taken at face value by the media.
On the foreign front, Trump repeated his claim that the last Islamic State group fighters in Syria would be captured or killed imminently — “as of tomorrow” — after telling US troops on Thursday that “we just took over” 100 percent of the so-called caliphate.
Two weeks earlier Trump had declared taht the fall of the caliphate would be announced “over the next 24 hours.”
He railed against Chinese tariffs on US goods and said that the US loses US$500 billion a year to the world’s second-biggest economy — “such a disaster.”
Trump regularly ignores the dominant US services sector to focus only on goods, when in 2017 the US trade deficit with China was actually US$337 billion — not US$500 billion.
Trump last year initiated a tariff dispute with Beijing, which has taken a nasty bite out of US growth.
Although both sides said they are now close to resolving the dispute, Trump said that he is “fine with it” and told his supporters: “The beauty is this. I have US$250 billion more to put tariffs on.”
The word “socialism” has been in heavy rotation since some Democratic candidates began openly embracing liberal platforms, including the Green New Deal and a Medicare for All.
US Vice President Mike Pence on Friday spoke at the four-day conference in National Harbor, Maryland, to warn that Democrats are taking a “hard left turn” ahead of next year.
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