Making his first appearance in the Cape Fear region since a scheduled April event was canceled by inclement weather, Trump spoke for about an hour at the Wilmington airport in his typical, associational style.
Trump spent a lot of time criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris on border security, gun rights, and the economy — but also took swipes at culture war issues. He promised to take critical race theory out of politics and “end the transgender insanity in our schools.”
In one of many non sequiturs, he repeated the debunked misgendering of Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif.
Without offering specifics on how he would achieve them, Trump offered several bold economic promises.
“Within 12 months, your energy prices will be cut in half….and by slashing inflation, we will cut interest rates and reduce the monthly cost of your typical mortgage by $1,000 — $1,000 a month," Trump told the crowd.
According to reporting by Axios, experts have been skeptical of Trump's ability to move the needle so significantly on energy prices, which have risen largely in line with inflation over the last twenty years — including during Trump's term as president. Trump's mortgage-savings promise, which would nearly halve the average North Carolina monthly payment, would also be a considerable undertaking. Those promises, while audibly popular with the crowd, would be difficult to evaluate without specifics.
Adding something new to the mix, Trump read aloud from a late-night all-caps Truth Social post he’d made on Friday evening, claiming economic prosperity would quash women’s concerns about abortion restrictions.
"Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion, because it is now where it always had to be, with the states and with the vote of the people," Trump said, repeating lines from his post.
Notably, Trump did not repeat his bigoted falsehoods about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. Also missing from the speech — and the rally — Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, the subject of a potentially career-ending CNN report this week.
Robinson has denied CNN’s claims, but that hasn’t stopped high-ranking and influential Republicans, apparently including Trump, from distancing themselves (some even before the story published).
You can listen to Trump's remarks in full below:
