While most speakers at the Faith and Freedom Coalition played up conservative themes, Donald Trump delivered a crowd-pleasing reprise of a few old favorite themes.
But also in his sights: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who has called for spending offsets for disaster-relief funds following a tornado in Joplin, a southwestern Missouri town, that killed at least 138 people.
“Representative Cantor, who I like, said we don’t want to give money to the tornado victims. And yet in Afghanistan, we’re spending $10 billion a month,” Trump said. “But we don’t want to help the people that got devastated by tornadoes, wiped out, killed, maimed, injured.”
Trump’s only attempt to show his social conservative bona fides came at the outset of his speech, when he showed a blow-up of his confirmation class picture from First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, New York.
“It doesn’t always play, but in this crowd, it plays,” he said.
The last time Trump was in Washington, he noted, he attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he bore the brunt of jokes from both President Barack Obama and “Saturday Night Live” head writer Seth Meyers.
Trump insisted that he and his wife Melania were “honored” by the attention, and was surprised to see headlines that said he was “humiliated” by the jabs thrown his way.
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“Nobody is protected like Barack Hussein Obama,” the real estate mogul said of the media’s coverage of the president’s tenure. “I have never seen press that is so protective of a human being before.”
Trump, who has since tried to stoke talk of his running as an independent, reprised his calls for Obama’s birth certificate — though the White House officially released a long-form copy of the document in April.
“I don’t know exactly what he showed, but you know, some day somebody’s gonna figure that one out,” he said.
And he took a dig at the target of the week, fellow New Yorker Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has been unable to give a clear explanation of how a photo of a man’s crotch was sent to a woman in Seattle through his Twitter account. Trump crowed, drawing a rousing applause: “Of course it was his picture — take a look at those skinny legs.”
