But he then insisted: “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 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.
In June he sent the National Guard to Los Angeles - against the wishes of the mayor and governor.
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.
“When I see what’s happening to our cities, and then 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.”
Today, he further tightened his clampdown by signing an executive order to investigate and prosecute people who burn the US flag - despite a 1989 ruling by the 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.
‘Violent fish’
Trump announced new measures tightening his grip on security in Washington, ordering Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth to set up a specialised unit within Washington’s National Guard for public order and ending cashless bail.
He also indicated that he would soon be changing the name of Hegseth’s department.
“World War Two, it was called the Department of War,” Trump told reporters. “Between us, I think we’re going to change the name.”
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.
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”.
-Agence France-Presse
