Trump Rambles About His Enemies In More On-Brand Speech After His Inaugural Address

WASHINGTON — After delivering a relatively restrained inaugural address in the U.S. Capitol rotunda Monday, President Donald Trump went downstairs to the Capitol Visitor Center and delivered a much more typical speech insulting his enemies and meandering from topic to topic.

Speaking to an overflow crowd of his supporters, including influencers Jake and Logan Paul, Trump jokingly complained his wife and close advisers stopped him from saying what he really wanted to say in his official inaugural address.

“I did have a couple things to say that were extremely controversial and between JD [Vance] and Melania, and anybody else, I heard, ‘Please sir, it’s such a beautiful, unifying speech. Please, sir, don’t say these things,’” Trump said at the top of his 45-minute-long remarks.

Trump then called former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) a “lunatic” and criticized former President Joe Biden for giving preemptive pardons to Cheney and several other Trump critics, including retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, who served as Trump’s chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley sounded alarm bells about Trump in October, calling him “fascist to the core.”

“Why are we trying to help a guy like Milley? Why are we doing Milley? He was pardoned. What he said... Why are we helping Liz Cheney? She’s a crying lunatic,” he said, adding that former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), another critic, also likes to cry.

Trump said his advisers didn’t want him to talk about his plans to pardon his supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but suggested he would soon follow through on his many pledges to pardon them for their crimes that day. 

“You’re going to see a lot of action on the J-6 hostages,” he said, to some cheers from the crowd. 

At one point, Trump went on a lengthy digression about the disputed allegation  he had lunged at a Secret Service officer who refused to drive him to the Capitol that day. Trump described the officer as one of the toughest he’d ever met. 

“I had a friend who said, ‘Why are you disputing that story, that is the coolest story I have ever heard,’ that I would attack a karate champion, get rebuffed and throw my arms around a guy with a neck this big,” Trump said, holding his hands up to show the officer’s neck size. 

Trump devoted far more time to discussing border security and immigration ahead of his plan to sign an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border.

“They all said inflation was the number one issue. I said, I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue for the people that I know,” Trump said.

“How many times can you say an apple is double in cost?”

In another digression, Trump recalled that in his first term he was upset that his border wall would have anti-climbing panels on top.

“I hated it. I said, ‘It is so unattractive.’ I said, ‘Why would that work? I won’t believe it would work,’” he said, before describing a demonstration with live climbers who couldn’t get around the top panel. “The anti-climb, they could not get around it. So sometimes you sacrifice beauty for efficiency.”

Trump also complained that the 2020 election, which he lost by 7 million votes, was “totally rigged.”

Trump repeatedly told the downstairs crowd they were getting better treatment than the people upstairs, where his Cabinet nominees mingled with members of Congress and wealthy tech magnates such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.  

While the billionaires got to enjoy the Capitol rotunda, several Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, watched the ceremony from screens in the visitor’s center before Trump came down to talk. At one point, the president mentioned Abbott in his remarks, and then appeared surprised that Abbott was in the audience.

“Wow, look at you,” Trump said. “You mean we could not get you up in the front row?”

It may have been a less formal setting, but Trump assured the downstairs crowd he was treating them to a high-quality experience.

“I think this a better speech than the one I made upstairs,” Trump said.