Donald Trump flew to Garden City, New York on Friday for a law and order rally at the Nassau County Police Academy, standing before a room of law enforcement officers alongside Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer, whose presence nobody fully explained.
The speech was billed as a crime and public safety event ahead of November’s midterms, and it became about something considerably more personal.
Trump opened with his familiar claim that Washington D.C. had been dangerously out of control before he arrived, calling it now “one of the safest cities in the country” with “very little crime” and adding: “It was so bad when I got there.”
That claim has been repeatedly challenged by the data. Violent crime in the capital had been falling for years before he took office, and an independent analysis of arrest records found his administration’s impact had been significantly overstated.
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From that foundation, the speech moved somewhere nobody in the room had apparently anticipated.
Trump told the audience that people thank him constantly when he arrives at the White House each morning, before landing on a specific group he wanted everyone to know about. “These young, beautiful girls, these young, beautiful girls, these young, beautiful girls in the White House,” he said, repeating the phrase three times without apparent awareness of the room’s shifting energy.
He pressed on regardless, adding: “You know, they come in — and I’m not supposed to say ‘beautiful,’ but what the hell. These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls… they wanna be safe.”
He then performed both sides of a conversation with one of these unnamed women: “‘Mr. President, may I speak to you?’ Yes. ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you.’ I said, ‘Why are you thanking me?’ ‘Because a year and a half ago I was afraid to leave… I was afraid to open the door to my apartment. And now I walk to the White House every morning and I have absolutely no fear. Thank you sir!'”
The audience of mostly male police officers absorbed all of that in silence, while Blanche and Patel, seated nearby, were photographed with expressions that were genuinely difficult to categorize. This was also not Trump’s first public struggle with the question of whether he was allowed to call women beautiful.
At a Women’s History Month event in March, he told the room “Women are the whole deal, okay?” before noting he was apparently not supposed to use the word beautiful in public settings anymore, a restriction Friday’s speech confirmed he has not taken seriously.
The Iran war surfaced later and produced its own striking moment. Trump told the crowd he was considering declaring the Strait of Hormuz “a territory of the United States,” saying: “Essentially, that’s what it is. We have a blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to.”
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
