Trump is holding another rally in Louisiana tonight. Quotes and fact checks in this thread.
Trump urges people to vote for Eddie Rispone. "I really need you, but YOU really need you," he says. He describes the governor race as a chance to send a message to Washington Democrats who are "corrupt" and "crazy."
Trump: "America is respected again. Respected at the highest levels. Every country that comes to see me, they respect our country again."
Trump launches into his now-familiar attack on the impeachment effort: Democrats are "crazed lunatics" who are ripping the country apart, trying to revive the effort that failed with the Mueller probe, trying to invalidate votes.
Trump: "Their lies will be exposed." He adds, "Their schemes are already unraveling."
Trump mocks Taylor and Kent for being silent when they were asked to identify impeachable offences. Taylor made clear that they were there as fact witnesses, not to recommend impeachment or non-impeachment.
Trump is reading out an article from the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro's website.
Trump says he took down the Bush dynasty, Clinton dynasty, and "the very crooked Obama group" (he does not elaborate). He adds, "So we took down Bush, Clinton, Obama." He asks: why, therefore, would he need foreign help to beat lowly Biden?
Trump says Rep. Adam Schiff has a "little 10-inch neck." He then performs this exchange: "What size shirts do you need, Adam?" "I wear a size 9." Returning to his own voice, he says, "Nine! He will not make the LSU football team."
Trump is recounting his usual imaginary timeline, saying that after Schiff delivered an inaccurate account of his Zelensky call, "I said, I better release the real call," and outsmarted Schiff. Schiff spoke *a day after* Trump released the rough transcript.
Trump on Schiff: "He's a thief. He's a crook." No evidence of this. Trump adds, "He should be prosecuted. The only problem is, he has immunity." He does.
Trump says impeachment has been "very hard on my family...very, very hard." He very rarely invokes his family in this way.
Sir Alert. Trump says Republicans are coming up to him about impeachment: "'Sir, our poll numbers are going through the roof, do you think we could keep this going?' I said, 'Do me a favor, let's get it ended.' They said, 'But let's keep it going, President, it's so great.'"
"If you want to see what corruption looks like," Trump says, watch the video of Biden boasting about how he pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general. (The video does not show any corruption. The prosecutor was widely considered ineffective or corrupt.)
Trump says the prosecutor was "going after his son." There's no evidence Hunter Biden was ever under investigation, and even the investigation into the owner of Burisma appeared to be inactive at the time of Joe Biden's pressure.
Trump says he hopes Joe Biden wins the nomination and Joe Biden is very sleepy and exhausted.
Trump is citing a report he says showed that Trump got "64% bad publicity" over the death of Baghdadi. He asks how this could have happened. (Not sure of the source for the number; part of the reason for some critical coverage was his bizarre post-death press conference.)
Trump is repeating his extremely dubious claim that he helped Matt Bevin gain 19 percentage points. (One outlier poll had previously showed him down that much.) Trump tells Louisiana that he got bad coverage for Bevin's loss, "so you gotta give me a big win, please, okay? Okay?"
Windmills. "The birds are dropping all over the place."
Trump says Louisiana is doing poorly compared to other states' economies, "and that's even after I gave you" a $10 billion LNG facility he visited. The facility was approved under Obama. This is explained in detail on the facility's website. cameronlng.com/lng-import-exp….
Louisiana Republicans complain that Louisiana has the country's second-highest car insurance costs. Trump has promoted it to the country's highest car insurance costs.
Eddie Rispone is speaking.
Trump again suggests that his Louisiana crowd does not know what Oxford is, saying of Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy: "Went to Oxford. He went to Oxford. You know what that means? That means good."
Trump says he visited Rep. Steve Scalise in the hospital after he was shot, and Scalise's wife was crying, and he told Scalise, "'Your wife loves you, because she was crying.' You know, I've known many wives that weren't crying in those cases."
Sen. John Kennedy is speaking. He says he is a "proud deplorable" and unlike the "cultured, cosmopolitan, goat's milk latte-drinkin', avocado toast-eating, insiders elite."
Trump introduced Kennedy by noting he is a graduate of Oxford.
Sen. Bill Cassidy makes this pitch to the MAGA crowd: "If Eddie Rispone gets elected, do you know who they're gonna credit? They're gonna credit Donald ____." The crowd shouts "TRUMP!"
He adds that "they're also gonna credit you."
He adds that "they're also gonna credit you."
Rep. Ralph Abraham on Trump and...Katie Hill: "While the Democrats are trying to convince us that three makes a couple - I don't have any idea what a 'throuple' is, but that's what they tell us, that three makes two - this great man is working for us every day of the week."
Trump boasts about strong economic statistics, boasts that the US is the world's #1 producer of oil and natural gas (that title was achieved in 2012), and mocks Beto O'Rourke.
Some context: Kennedy, a multimillionaire lawyer, graduated from Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia and Oxford University.
Trump, decrying "global" initiatives, says the US has wasted resources taking care of "nations you never even heard of."
Trump says the Supreme Court "recently" upheld his travel ban. That happened 16 months ago. (Trump habitually moves good news closer to the present -- he's regularly announcing that old things were just announced, just decided, just in.)
Trump says the wall is being built faster than anyone thought possible. No new miles of additional barriers have been erected where none existed before. (New barriers are now under construction in Texas.)
Trump repeats his usual, already-disproven promise to always protect patients with pre-existing conditions.
Trump, more on-script than he often is, boasts of his many judicial appointments, his investments in the military, his withdrawal from the "horrible" Iran nuclear deal, his move of the US embassy in Israel.
Trump calls Democrats corrupt maniacs.
Trump has concluded. That was shorter than most of his recent rallies.
