Hours after his former No. 2 and possible 2024 primary rival gave a speech outlining a “road map for conservative leaders,” former President Trump delivered a grim and rambling speech about violent crime in his first appearance in D.C. since he skipped Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day ceremony and left the White House in 2020.
“We need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America, and strongly defeat it, and be tough and be nasty and be mean if we have to,” Trump said in remarks to the America First Policy Institute, not far from where he delivered a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, in which he encouraged supporters he knew were armed to march on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.
Trump’s speech echoed themes from his inauguration speech in 2017, in which he spoke about crime-ridden streets and “American carnage.”
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