Donald Trump warned that Republican senators who don’t support legislation repealing and replacing Obamacare “will have a lot of problems”.
Speaking for an hour at a campaign-style rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump took a victory lap after the Senate voted to begin debate on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “We are now one step closer to liberating our citizens from this Obamacare nightmare,” he said.
Before a raucous crowd in the blue-collar city, Trump went on to warn that “any senator who votes against repeal and replace tells America that they are fine with the Obamacare nightmare, and I predict they’ll have a lot of problems”.
However, Trump spent comparatively little time discussing healthcare. Instead, he returned to familiar themes from his freewheeling presidential campaign, deriding “fake news” and pledging once again to “build that wall” on the border between the US and Mexico. He also returned to familiar boasts about how, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, he “can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office” and taunted protesters, saying about one: “He’s going back home to mommy.”
He spent much of the rally boasting about his accomplishments since taking office: “I think, with few exceptions, no president has done anywhere near what we have done in his first six months.”
In particular, Trump dwelled on his efforts to curb illegal immigration and deport undocumented migrants from the US. Trump claimed that in doing so “we are liberating our towns and cities” and warned darkly of immigrants in gangs committing crimes.
“They don’t want to use guns because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough,” claimed Trump. “So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15 and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die, and these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long.”
Trump did not address the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election or his growing displeasure with Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, for recusing himself from the justice department’s investigation into the 2016 campaign.
