President Trump told a rally in North Carolina all about how he has saved the country from Democratic-instilled economic hardship and wokeness while touting his lower drug prices and vowing to go after insurance companies.
“Over the past 11 months, we have brought more positive change to Washington than any administration in American history,” he said Friday in the Rocky Mount hall. “For the last four years, the United States was ruled by politicians who fought only for insiders, illegal aliens, career criminals, corporate lobbyists, prisoners, terrorists and, above all, foreign nations which took advantage of us at levels never seen before.”
He focused on prices dropping, from eggs to drug prices, which he spoke at length about earlier Friday at the White House with executives from nine drug manufacturing companies.
“Your drugs are coming down at levels that nobody ever thought was possible. This achievement alone should win us the midterms,” he said, promoting TrumpRx, a website to be launched early next year where Americans can buy low-priced drugs.
He continued to say that he has set his sights on health insurance companies next and that a meeting will be set up with executives, whom he called “fat cats,” possibly over Christmas while he’s at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate or back in Washington.
The focus has been on who will come up with a more effective health care proposal as Affordable Care Act tax subsidies expire. The president maintains that he wants money to go directly to the people so they can buy their own, better health care, and slams the ACA, or Obamacare, as the “Unaffordable Care Act.”
He said another government shutdown could be coming over health care since Democrats are “beholden to the insurance companies.”
“I don’t know what they can do about it, but they’ll probably close down the government,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s so simple. The money should go to the people. The people should then take all of this money and buy the best health care there is.”
He said many health insurance executives will “surprise us, but maybe we’ll ask them for a 50% cut, and maybe they’ll give it. You know, you never know. You saw what happened with the drug companies.”
He railed against his former ally, Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, using his nickname for her, “Marjorie Traitor Brown,” saying she decided to give up her House seat because he wouldn’t call her back.
He also focused on Minnesota, where fraud scandals have plagued the state surrounding Somali residents, with billions of taxpayer dollars lost. He criticized Ilhan Omar, the state’s Somali immigrant congresswoman, accusing the Democrat of making up a story about her son being stopped by police and saying she should be thrown out of the U.S.
He touted job creation in North Carolina and residents being “lifted off of food stamps.”
The president said he helped the state recover from Hurricane Helene’s devastation last year.
“If I didn’t get elected, you would be — people were sitting in the mud, but I helped rebuild your state, and I didn’t get any help from the Democrats,” he said.
Mr. Trump said tariffs were imposed “to protect North Carolina workers [and] North Carolina’s cherished furniture industry, which has been decimated by China.
“I was very good at real estate, I would tell you, but I used to come to North Carolina to buy furniture for lobbies or furniture for hotels. And I was here a lot. I mean, you’ve been decimated, but it’s coming back now, because I put tariffs on.”
The rally in Rocky Mount is a part of a series of stops the president plans to make ahead of the 2026 midterms. The speeches focus on his economic plans to counteract the Democrats’ focus on affordability. The president’s first rally was in Pennsylvania last week.
The latest rally also came after Mr. Trump gave a prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday night focused on his accomplishments through the year and what’s next.
Democrats have been homing in on what they call an affordability crisis, helping them win off-year elections across the country.
Mr. Trump has been brushing off voters’ concerns about the economy, dismissing the topic of affordability as “a hoax.” He told Politico that he’d give himself an “A plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” on the economy.
An NBC News poll released Sunday found that 42% of voters have a negative view of the economy, while an AP-NORC poll last week found 31% of Americans approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy. That’s down from 40% in March and the lowest mark of his two terms.
