US President Donald Trump. Photo / Mandel Ngan, AFP
United States President Donald Trump today suggested that many Americans would like a dictator.
The comment came 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 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 also considering sending the military into 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 California governor.
The President was particularly disparaging of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a vocal opponent who has strongly rejected any move to send 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.”
Pritzker, a billionaire businessman like Trump, launched his own broadside at the President in a press conference today, calling him “a wannabe dictator” who “wants to use the military to occupy a US city, punish his dissidents, and score political points”.
Trump further tightened his clampdown today by signing an executive order to investigate and prosecute people who burn the American 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 also 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 said he would soon be changing the name of Hegseth’s department to the Department of War, its name from 1789 to 1947.
“Defence is too defensive,” Trump told reporters.
Democrats have repeatedly accused Trump of pushing presidential power way past its constitutional limits, most recently by deploying troops in the US capital.
He has also clamped down on everything from the federal bureaucracy and “woke” policies to his political opponents.
But the 79-year-old rejected all criticism in his angry and wide-ranging Oval Office diatribe, speaking for more than 45 minutes before taking reporters’ questions.
Trump dismissed 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 a “pretty violent” invasive fish species in the Great Lakes.
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.
-Agence France-Presse