Politics

Trump again attacks media at campaign-style rally in Florida

Ali Vitali
WATCH LIVE


U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during his "Make America Great Again" rally at Orlando Melbourne International Airport in Melbourne, Florida on February 18, 2017.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

President Donald Trump at a rally in Florida Saturday again ripped the media as "fake news" and renewed pledges on Obamacare and border security in an event that appeared little changed from the rallies he gave on the campaign trail.

"They just don't want to report the truth," Trump told the crowd of around 9,000 in Melbourne, calling the media as "part of the problem" and "part of the corrupt system."

"They have their own agenda, and their agenda is not your agenda," the president said. Trump's attacks on the media came a day after the president on Twitter called the "fake" news media "the enemy of the American people."

Despite the fact that the 2016 election has long come and gone, the phenomena of the Trump rally felt as if it had been frozen in time, nearly perfectly preserved since the last time the then-candidate strode to the podium and told thousands of his cheering supporters about the woes of the country and the battles he planned to fight.

Trump earned applause for saying he'd repeal and replace Obamacare, a line that consistently ushered in some of his loudest praise from crowds across the country in 2016.

The president promised a new healthcare plan to replace it "in a couple of weeks." It would be "great," he said, but did not expand further as to what it might entail.


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Trump also previewed a new executive order to replace his court-blocked order temporarily suspending entry to the U.S. of nationals from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

"We will do something next week, I think you'll be impressed," Trump said.

Trump complained about the appeals court judges who refused to reinstate his executive order, which critics have called a "Muslim ban," something Trump denies. The president called the judges' ruling "very sad" and read part of a statute giving authority to the president authority in matters of immigration and national security.

"If you have a college education, you can understand it. If you have a high school education you can understand it, if you were a bad student in high school you can understand it," Trump said of the statute.

Trump's Florida rally came at the end of a turbulent few weeks that saw court defeats over his executive order restricting travel, and the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, after he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other administration officials about the nature of his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the United States.

Trump told the crowd gathered in a hangar at the Orlando Melbourne International Airport that his administration was on the right track.

"I hear your demands, I hear your voices, and I promise you I will deliver," Trump said. "And by the way, you've seen what we've accomplished in a very short period of time — the White House is running so smoothly, so smoothly."

Trump said he "inherited one big mess."

And although Trump told the crowd that our nation must "ignore the tired echoes of yesterday's fights," Trump returned to the campaign that ended with his election to the nation's highest office.

He reminded the crowd that the November election was supposed to "the greatest defeat in the modern history of American politics — and it was, for the Democrats, not the Republicans."

Trump brought up, as he did often during the campaign, that he did well with women and that the polls conducted by the media that showed otherwise were "phony."

After the rally, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Trump authored his own remarks.