US President Donald Trump on Monday suggested many Americans would like a dictator as he signed orders to tighten his federal clampdown on the capital Washington and to prosecute flag-burners.
During a rambling 80-minute event in the Oval Office, Trump lambasted critics and the media as he complained that he was not getting credit for his National Guard-backed crackdown on crime and immigration.
“They say ‘we don’t need him. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying: ‘Maybe we like a dictator,'” Trump told reporters.
“I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”
Trump — who attempted to overturn the results of his 2020 election defeat by Joe Biden at the end of his first term — said before winning a second term in November that he would be a “dictator on day one.”
Republican Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington earlier this month to counter what he alleged was an out-of-control crime problem, also taking federal control of the city’s police department.
Trump said he was considering whether to send in the military to the cities of Chicago and Baltimore as he targets a series of Democratic strongholds. He sent the National Guard to Los Angeles — against the mayor’s and governor’s wishes — in June.
The president was particularly disparaging of Illinois governor and vocal opponent JB Pritzker, who has strongly rejected any move to send in troops to Chicago.
“You send them, and instead of being praised, they’re saying, ‘you’re trying to take over the Republic,'” said Trump.
“These people are sick.”
Trump further tightened his clampdown on Monday by signing an executive order to investigate and prosecute people who burn the US flag — despite a 1989 ruling by the US Supreme Court saying that the act is protected by freedom of speech laws.
“If you burn a flag you get one year in jail — no early exits, no nothing,” Trump said.
Trump announced new measures tightening his grip on security in Washington, ordering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to set up a specialized unit within Washington’s National Guard for public order, and ending cashless bail.
He also said that he would soon be changing the name of Hegseth’s department to the Department of War, its name from 1789 to 1947.
“Defense is too defensive,” Trump told reporters.
Democrats have repeatedly accused Trump of pushing presidential power way past its constitutional limits, most recently by deploying the National Guard in the US capital.
Billionaire Trump has also clamped down on everything from the federal bureaucracy and “woke” politics to his political opponents.
But the 79-year-old rejected all the criticisms in his angry and wide-ranging diatribe in the Oval Office, speaking for more than 45 minutes before taking reporters’ questions.
Trump rejected opponents who have called him racist by proclaiming “I love Black People” — before describing a Salvadoran man who is set to be deported to Uganda in an immigration row as an “animal.”
He went on a long detour about what he called a lack of gratitude from Pritzker about measures to tackle an invasive fish species in the Great Lakes.
“We have a very, pretty violent fish that comes from China. China carp, Chinese carp. You see them jumping out — they jump into boats and they jump all over the place,” Trump said.
Trump also called his Democratic predecessor Biden a “moron” and dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal 2022 invasion of Ukraine as being the result of “big personality conflicts.”
The US president later repeatedly expressed his admiration for another strongman leader — North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — during a meeting with South Korea’s president in the Oval Office.
“I’d like to have a meeting. I get along great with him,” Trump said of Kim, whom he met three times in his first term.
