Out of town pool report #5: Remarks over/ departure

President Trump took the stage at 3:35 pm. He ended at 5:37 pm marking an over two-hour speech.

Pool was escorted out at 5:38 pm before POTUS left the stage.

We are rolling to the airport at 5:41 pm.

Some quotes to check against transcript:

Trump said he watched the Iowa Hawkeyes' win over Wisconsin yesterday but doesn't have time to watch full games. "I’m doing these damn rallies all over the place,” he said. He congratulated the team and coach, adding, “I said, boy, that’s good because they’re going to be in a great mood when I show up tomorrow. … But we’re going to have a much bigger win on Tuesday.”

He urged Iowa voters to elect Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson and gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn. Both joined the president on stage towards the end of his remarks. Lahn drew loud applause as he praised the FBI for prosecuting fraud in Minnesota.

Trump spoke about Hinson’s weight loss, saying she had gotten into “perfect shape” through an “old-fashioned regimen” and not weight loss drugs. "I knew Ashley for a long time, and she was a little bit heavier,” Trump said. “She went out, the old-fashioned way, not with, you know, 'give me a shot.’” He added: She put herself in shape. She's in perfect shape.”

In a direct appeal to Iowa voters, he touted a $15 billion Iowa steel manufacturing plant announced in September.

He spoke about House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s battle with cancer, and the bullet that hit him when a “lunatic” shooter opened fire during a team practice for the Congressional Baseball Game. He praised his work ethic and said that "Mike and I were talking about it before,” referring to House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Earlier, Trump called Johnson up to the stage who urged Republicans to turn out.

Trump said that the New York Times should be prosecuted for publishing fake surveys by a company called ‘Wedgewood Polls.' "People respected it, and then they announced that they're not real polls,” he said. "They just gave out numbers, and that's true with a lot of polls, I think, but this one admitted it.”

On his remodeling and construction efforts, Trump called himself a “reverse tornado": “The thing I do best, I think, is I build things. They say, ‘He's a reverse tornado, he builds everything in his way.’” He said a friend gave him the moniker.

He defended this work, saying the White House "has to be pristine” and "perfect." "It can't have exterior moldings half falling off,” he said. "It can't have broken windows at the main entrance where the window has been broken for years. You can't have all these things.”

Trump questioned why Congressional investigators have not looked into the funding behind former President Obama’s presidential library, even as they investigate the financing of his own projects. "Well, here's a guy who got billions of dollars to build this thing. Nobody's saying who put up the money,” Trump said. "I believe it might have been very much the same people that are backing Mohammed. I call him Mohammed, not Abdul,” he said, referring to Abdul El-Sayed.

Trump praised Haley Stevens’ endorsement of Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and called him "apple pie.” “What this country needs a little apple pie,” Trump said. "We don't need the communists, the jihadists, the Muslim Brotherhood. We need apple pie.”

He spoke about voting machines and said that during the Michigan Democrat primary, “it took like three, four days for them to so-called tabulate with their machines.” He added: "How about California? We think we'll have the answer within the next three months."

If El-Sayed is elected, “we'll have to put him through metal detectors in order to seat him,” Trump said.

He said that the Dan J. Sullivan “scheme” was “done by New York and Washington lawyers.”

And here are the full quotes on Jensen Huang from the tarmac gaggle earlier. Trump said he didn’t know when asked if Huang had a security clearance. Asked about the nature of Huang’s relationship with the women suspected by intelligence officers to be a Chinese operative, Trump said: “I don’t know. I just know that he's an outstanding person, and I can't imagine it would be a problem. But we'll certainly find out.”

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Katherine Doyle
The Washington Post