Trump spoke to the assembled graduates of the US Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, offering advice, congratulating them on their success … and also commenting on their bodies and going off on a tangent about every political achievement he considers himself to have made.
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“Our country is hot,” Trump said, while “under the last administration, we were a dead country.”
That’s probably only about the 500th time he’s said that. Maybe.
“I hate good-looking men,” the 79-year-old Trump said, unprompted, as a young man being recognized for his excellent academic record approached the stage. When the student who’d scored highest in the fitness test came up, he told the crowd: “I wanna check him out … Look at the muscles on this guy! I just hit him on the shoulder and hurt my hand, it’s like hitting a rock!”
The reason Trump cares about this stuff, he added, is because “it’s competition for me too. I have to compete with you now!” What that means is anyone’s guess, but never mind, because the next name on the list was the class president, who just happened to be Trump’s Achilles’ heel: a woman.
“If I didn’t invite her up, I’d be accused of discrimination,” was what the president said when he came to Savannah Riera’s name. If that line sounds familiar to you, it’s because he used it a few months ago for the gold medal-winning women’s Olympic hockey team, when he “joked” that he would have to invite them to the State of the Union alongside their male counterparts for the same reason.
Well sure but it’s such a fabulous joke that it’s acceptable for him to bring it out again. What could be funnier than telling them he wouldn’t invite a woman up if he didn’t have to? Hahahahaha hilarious.
After almost an hour, it seemed that he was ready to round off his speech: he announced that he was going to offer a few words of hard-won life advice to the graduates. And, despite it all, this is probably where it became most weird.
We’ve all become accustomed to this way that Trump does political rhetoric — the ideological stream-of-consciousness, the personal and political attacks, and the bombastic self-congratulation. But what’s most shocking at this point is how little he has to say when he gets the opportunity to speak from the heart. Those final words of advice were so basic and cliched as to be effectively meaningless.
“Never, ever give up,” the president of the United States said, as if he were imparting some closely guarded secret. Also: “think big.” And lastly, “work hard.”
The way he does? Running his mouth, telling underlings which insults to post on Truth Social, spitting insults at women journalists? That kind of hard work?
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