PALM BEACH: One day after Congress validated his election victory, Donald Trump held a convoluted press conference on Tuesday, threatening both military action to secure the Panama Canal and economic force against neighboring Canada.
The US president-elect had assembled media in southern Florida to declare an Emirati investment of $20 billion in US technology, but his speech soon devolved into a tirade as he again brought up several of his campaign points.
“The entire world’s opinion has changed since we won the election. International people have called me. “They said, ‘Thank you, thank you,'” Trump remarked as he outlined his four-year plan.
The White House was “trying everything they can to make it more difficult,” according to the president-elect, who attacked Joe Biden for the transition.
The 78-year-old Trump has refused to take part in the handover of power to Biden and has not accepted his loss in 2020.
claims he would “seize” the Panama Canal and change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”
On the global scene, the incoming president declared that he intended to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and threatened to impose steep taxes on the US’s southern neighbor if it did not stop illegal immigration across the border.
Reiterating his criticism of then-President Jimmy Carter’s decision to leave local administration of the Central American waterway, he refused to rule out using the military to grab Greenland and the Panama Canal, both of which he has long desired. Carter passed away last month.
When questioned about whether he would use military force to subdue Canada, the new president responded, “No, economic force.”
Although it was occasionally hard to distinguish between humor or bombast and actual policy in many of his statements, Trump said that removing the “artificially drawn” US-Canada border would improve national security.
Opening
Reiterating the well-known fallacious assertion that America “had no wars” during his first term, he attacked President Joe Biden for the US exit from Afghanistan as well as his foreign policy in Ukraine and Syria.
“The extremist Islamic State organization, or ISIS, was vanquished.” There were no wars. Trump declared, “I’m entering a world that is raging with Russia, Ukraine, and Israel.”
The majority of the event was devoted to condemnation of Biden, whom Trump falsely claimed was responsible for the several legal issues he is facing, such as the potential publication of a federal probe into his attempts to rig the 2020 election and the sentence scheduled for Friday in his hush money case in New York.
The Republican billionaire, who will be back in the White House on January 20, criticized his opponent for inflation and promised to revoke the Democratic president’s executive order that forbade the exploration of offshore oil and gas.
The press conference took place the day after Congress formally named Trump the next president by counting and certifying his state-by-state electoral college votes.
When asked if he would pardon those who had attacked police, Trump said he would pardon many of his followers who had stormed Congress. Falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd had been unarmed, he sidestepped the topic.
