3/10/2018

DONALDISM/GOP/POLITICS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The trip was ostensibly an effort to help Republicans stave off a deflating defeat in a western Pennsylvania congressional district that President Trump won by 20 points.
And in a rally at Pittsburgh’s airport on Saturday evening, Mr. Trump did mention the Republican running in Tuesday’s [3-13-18] special election, Rick Saccone, a handful of times. A good man, he called him.
But for almost all of his 75-minute performance in front of a raucous crowd packed into a hangar, it was in-his-element Trump, vintage 2016: rambling and fiery, boastful and jocular — the part of being president that he loves perhaps the most.
Ricocheting off the teleprompter, the president showed the kind of free-flowing attitude that his aides have said they expect to see this year. He ticked off what he said were his achievements — some coming just in recent days — on a laundry list of issues like North Korea, trade and the economy, and attacked his predecessors for their failures on the same.
He spoke admiringly of foreign laws imposing the death penalty on drug dealers, and seemed to brush aside the notion of due process as he spoke of American officers grabbing gang members ‘by the neck’ and throwing them in the paddy wagon.
He derided past presidents as stiffs and lousy entertainers. He pummeled his favorite targets: Democrats and the ‘fake’ news media. And, always the showman, he dropped a bit of news, revealing the slogan for his 2020 re-election campaign:
Keep America Great. With an exclamation mark, he said.”

-Emily Cochrane and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Hosts Fiery Rally on the Heels of a Whirlwind Week,” The New York Times online, Mar. 10, 2018