Trump makes bizarre 'hit with a baseball bat' comment about Democratic senator
President Donald Trump made an odd remark about Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) looking as if he'd been beaten with a baseball bat.
The president spoke to reporters Friday morning in Fletcher, North Carolina, where he was touring areas devastated by Hurricane Helene last fall, and he floated the idea of eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency through executive order, making Canada the 51st state and wondering whether Schiff – one of his most prominent enemies – had been victimized by violence.
"I don't know, I was told that Schiff was going to travel with us to California," Trump said. "I wasn't thrilled, to be honest with you, and I saw him last night on television. It looks like he got hit with a baseball bat or something. What happened to him? Something happened to him. It was, it looked like he got hit. It looked like he got beat around, but, uh, I'll ask Karoline [Leavitt] to find out what happened to him. No, if he wanted to come out, I would have done that, but I don't know. Somebody said that he wanted to come on the plane, but I think he's staying back for the [Senate] votes. There's some pretty good votes going on."
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He was then asked to comment on his intention to eliminate FEMA, which he said wasn't as effective as relief that could be provided by individual states.
"Well we're looking here here you're talking about to start," Trump said. "We're going to start immediately, timeline, and to finish, it's going to be a period of time. You know, people are also rebuilding their houses. How long does it take to build a house, right. It takes the time, and I want them to build houses bigger, better, nicer than they had before so they can have at least they get something out of this disaster. This was a real disaster. No timeline will be fast in terms of infrastructure, I think very fast."
Trump then commented on his suggestion that Canada should become part of the U.S., which he believes is “losing $200 billion a year” to its northern neighbor.
"I asked him what would happen if we didn't do that, if we didn't subsidize Canada?" Trump said, recounting a purported conversation with Canadian president Justin Trudeau. "He said, 'We'd be a failed nation,' and I said, 'Then you should be a state, because why are we paying all of that money to Canada when, you know, we could use it ourselves, right?' So we take care of their military. You know, we ordered, we're going to order about 40 Coast Guard, big icebreakers, big ones, and all of a sudden Canada wants a piece of the deal. They say, 'Why are we doing that?' I mean, I like doing that if they're a state, but I don't like doing that if they're a nation. Also, they've been very nasty to us on trade. Historically, Canada has been very, very bad to us, very unfair to us on trade, so we'll see how it all works out.
"I would love to see Canada be the 51st state," Trump added. "The Canadian citizens, if that happened, would get a very big tax cut, a tremendous tax cut because they're very highly taxed, and you wouldn't have to worry about military. You wouldn't have to worry about many of the things. You'd have better health coverage, you'd have much better health coverage, so I think the people of Canada would like it, you know, if it's explained. But just to start off, they'd have a very, they'd have a massive tax cut and they'd have a lot more business because then we'd let business go to Canada routinely and there'd be no tariffs. You know, if we did that, there'd be no tariffs."
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