Trump huffs and puffs about wind, votes and Democrats at GOP dinner
In a freewheeling speech he apparently thought was not being televised, President Trump told a group of Republican lawmakers on Tuesday night that “we blew it” on health care, mocked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Biden, and advanced conspiracy theories about voter fraud and wind farms.
“Someone’s going to leak this whole damn speech to the media,” Trump said at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s spring dinner in Washington, D.C., in a speech that was broadcast live on C-SPAN.
The president proceeded to sound off on a multitude of topics, including the GOP’s failure to reclaim health care from the Democrats.
“They have health care right now,” Trump said. “We have to take that away from them. We have to protect and cannot run away from a thing called preexisting conditions. ... The Republican Party will be the champion of preexisting conditions.”
Trump repeated his vow to reform health care after his reelection.
“I will be asking that this be my first vote immediately after the election,” he said, the same thing he said when he was running for president in 2016.
The president again issued a baseless warning of widespread voter fraud.
“We’ve got to watch those vote tallies,” Trump said, suggesting without evidence that races in the 2018 midterms were wrongly decided for Democrats.
“You got to be a little bit more paranoid than you are,” the president told the crowd. “We have to be a little bit careful because I don’t like the way the votes are being tallied. I don’t like it, and you don’t like it either. You just don’t want to say it because you’re afraid of the press. You’re afraid of the press.”
Last year, Trump issued similar warnings about the U.S. Senate elections in Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott ultimately unseated the Democratic incumbent, Bill Nelson. The president has also claimed, without evidence, that millions of illegal votes were cast in California in 2016, costing him the popular vote. A commission he established on voter fraud was quietly dissolved.
The president mocked Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal, the ambitious environmental plan to move the country toward zero carbon emissions that was defeated last week in the Senate.
“The Green New Deal, done by a young bartender, 29 years old,” Trump said, referring to Ocasio-Cortez, who worked as a bartender before winning election to Congress last year.
He suggested that Democrats who support it are scared of the freshman congresswoman from New York.
“You have senators who are professionals that you guys know that have been there for a long time, white hair, everything perfect, and they’re standing behind her and they’re shaking, they’re petrified of her,” Trump told the crowd. “If they beat me with the Green New Deal, I deserve to lose.”
[Trump keeps claiming his father was born in Germany. It was the Bronx.]
Trump also weighed in about the mounting allegations against Biden. “The socialists are really taking care of him,” Trump said, repeating a theory that supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders were behind recent stories about the former vice president’s behavior with women.
“I was going to say, ‘Welcome to the world, Joe,’” Trump quipped. “You having a good time, Joe?”
And in a bizarre aside, the president continued his attack on turbine power, which a few days earlier he said, incorrectly, would cause power blackouts when there was no wind.
“If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” Trump said. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, OK?”
The president then mimicked the sound of a turbine.
There is no evidence the noise from windmills or turbines causes cancer.
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