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Donald Trump definitely sounded a little different during his Iowa caucus victory speech on Monday night. “Well, I want to thank everybody,” were the first words out of the notoriously not-so-humble former president’s mouth. Then he commended GOP rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis and invited his political opponents — whom he called “Democrats” and “liberals,” not “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin” — to join his effort to unify America.
“I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together,” Trump said. “We want to come together whether it’s Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative. It would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world, and straighten out the problems, and straighten out all of the death and destruction that we’re witnessing that’s practically never been like this.”
It seems likely that someone in Trump’s camp urged him to stress that he’s a uniter, not a divider, right before he walked onstage; he repeated the phrase come together five times in his 20-minute speech. And the message was heard clearly throughout the media. The Washington Times ran the headline “Toned down Trump promises to unite country in Iowa victory speech” and Politico went with “Trump congratulates his rivals after stomping them.” Fox News commentators described the speech as “measured” and “conciliatory.” On CNN, Abby Philip remarked, “He’s sending a signal to his party: This thing is over and he wants them to get onboard.”
So did we witness the birth of a kinder, gentler, more inclusive Trump on Monday night? Not exactly. CNN cut away from his remarks around the halfway mark, and many sleep-deprived political observers probably did the same. But just moments later, Trump started rambling about the migrant “invasion” and trashing Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter as history’s greatest monsters. Here’s a rundown of what Trump actually said in Iowa.
There was definitely a teasing tone in Trump’s voice as he said of his vanquished rivals, “I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together.” But it was notable that Trump used their actual names, as he’s taken to calling Haley “bird brain” and DeSantis “DeSantimonious” or other nasty nicknames.
The first half of Trump’s speech was mostly devoted to thanking Iowans, his campaign staffers, and his family members. He also praised his wife Melania’s mother, Amalija Knavs, who passed away recently, saying she was one of the “most special people I’ve ever known.” Even his little-known sister Elizabeth got a shoutout.
All of this was typical politician banter, but it’s unusual for Trump — who recently struggled to make empathetic remarks after a school shooting — to speak kindly about others for nearly ten minutes.
Are you supposed to just come out and say that you’re going to give one of your former rivals a sweet position in your Cabinet? Not really, but these days, Trump hinting that former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum will be rewarded for dropping out of the 2024 race and endorsing him barely registers as scandalous.
“The traction is never easy, right?” Trump said of Burgum’s failure to gain any momentum in the 2024 race. “You need controversy for traction sometimes. And this guy is the most solid guy. There’s no controversy whatsoever. And he’s one of the best governors in our country. And I hope that I’m going to be able to call on him to be a piece of the administration, a very important piece of the administration.”
As CNN cut away from Trump’s remarks, anchor Jake Tapper noted that Trump was shifting to his more typical incendiary topics. “Here he is, right now, under my voice. You can hear him repeating his anti-immigrant rhetoric,” Tappers said.
What CNN viewers missed was a dizzying shift from “come together” to migrants “coming from mental institutions,” which Trump claimed necessitates deporting millions of people each year. He said:
So we’re going to come together. We’re going to drill baby drill right away. We’re going to seal up the border because right now we have an invasion. We have an invasion of millions and millions of people that are coming into our country. I can’t imagine why they think that’s a good thing. It’s a very bad thing I think it’s a group of people that’s probably larger number than New York State and we can’t have that, we can’t have that. It’s not sustainable as a country. It’s horrible.
And you know they’re coming from prisons and jails. They’re coming from all over. They’re coming from countries most people have never heard of. And they are coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. They’re being emptied out into our country. And they are tourists. Many terrorists are coming in. You know 2019, I saw just recently on poll, they had none in 2019, no terrorists, now I even say there’s gotta be some, but they have none. And then as soon as this group took over they have hundreds and hundreds of terrorists coming. And known terrorists. Some of them really bad. And many of them are in and they came in and nobody knows where they are. This is not a good thing.
And we’re gonna have to deport. We’re going to have to have a deportation level that we haven’t seen in this country for a long time, since Dwight Eisenhower, actually.
“So, I don’t want to be overly rough on the president,” Trump said. “But I have to say that he is the worst president that we’ve had in the history of our country. He’s destroying our country.” He refrained from rambling about the “Biden Crime Family,” so this counts as restrained.
Trump then repeated his bizarrely phrased quip about Jimmy Carter, who is in hospice care and just lost his wife, saying that while watching Rosalynn’s funeral, “I thought to myself, Jimmy Carter is happy now. Because he will go down as being a brilliant president by comparison to Joe Biden.”
Anyone tempted to join Trump’s crusade to Make America United Again should know that he’s still spewing the same “stolen election” nonsense. He said that in the 2020 election he “got more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country. But they say we lost by a whisker.” (Trump did get more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but Biden beat Trump by 7 million votes.) He also dismissed his recent legal woes as 2024 “election interference” orchestrated by Biden:
I was there [in D.C. ] on one of the Biden indictment trials. You know … I go to a lot of courthouses because of Biden, because they’re using that for election interference. And it’s on things like election. And I don’t know if you know, but they did a poll tonight on the election of 2020: do you believe it was honest or not? 82 percent said, 82% said it was not. And we can’t have that, chairman, we can’t have a situation like that. So we’re gonna straighten out our elections.
Trump also played his foreign-policy hits, saying that if he were president, “Russia would’ve never attacked. Israel would’ve never been attacked.” He pledged that if reelected he’ll end the Russia-Ukraine war “very quickly” just by using his powers of negotiation.
While discussing his plans to clean up our cities, Trump incoherently complained about “riding on top of garbage like I did just a month ago” in D.C. and promised to “scrub those beautiful marble columns, and get the swastikas off them.”
He said he’d be happy to work with Democrats around the country to fix America’s cities, then suggested he’d accomplish this by letting police officers do whatever they want. “We’re gonna make [cities] safe. And we have to give our police officers immunity, so every time they do something they don’t get sued and stopped.”
Trump capped things off by inviting “Brick Man,” a Trump supporter who regularly dresses up as the Border Wall That Was Promised, onstage once again.
“He’s emblematic of what we did,” Trump claimed. “We built over 500 miles of wall. We were gonna add another 200 miles. It’s much more than we promised. And we had the safest border in the history of our country. Now we have the worst border in the history of the world.” The gentler Trump hasn’t lost his flair for the dramatic.
Here’s video of the full speech:
