Trump unveils new impression that makes Melania 'very upset' during Alabama commencement speech
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Donald Trump bemoaned that he was 'in trouble with' First Lady Melania Trump after delighting the University of Alabama commencement with a story criticizing transgender inclusion in sports.
The president has made a key plank of his second term platform stopping transgender participation in women's sports in particular.
Delivering the commencement address to over 6,000 students in Tuscaloosa Thursday night, the president teased a humorous example of what he saw as unfairness.
He asked: 'You ever see the weightlifting where they have a record that wasn't broken in 18 years?'
Trump then wondered aloud if he should 'imitate it' before talking about how the First Lady feels about the routine.
'You know, my wife gets very upset when I do this,' he joked, adding that Melania feels it's 'not presidential.'
'I said, 'yeah but people like it!''
Trump than asked the gathered students, parents and faculty if he 'should do it or not' to uproarious applause.
'I'm in trouble when I get home but that's okay, what the hell, I've been in lots of trouble before,' he quipped.
He then told a story about a women's weightlifting record that stood for 18 years that had been broken by a transgender woman with ease.
Trump mimed the futile attempts to lift a weight by a cisgender woman and then imitated the transgender woman doing so like it was nothing.
As the crowd laughed, Trump remembered his imagined predicament with his wife and said he had a plan.
'So now that I'm in trouble with my wife, I'm gonna' blame the University of Alabama for making me do it!'
The president offered some encouraging words and advice for graduating students at the University of Alabama on Thursday in a speech interspersed with complaints about his critics, accusations that judges were 'interfering' with his agenda and attacks on his predecessor, Joe Biden.
The Republican´s jolting speech was standard fare for Trump and well-received by the crowd in deep-red Alabama, which backed him in all three of his presidential runs.
'You´re the first graduating class of the golden age of America,' the president told the graduates.
But he quickly launched into a campaign-style diatribe, saying that the U.S. was being 'ripped off' before he took office and that the last four years, when he was out of power, 'were not good for our country.'
'But don´t let that scare you,' he said. 'It was an aberration.'
Trump has a long history of injecting such rhetoric into his remarks at venues where traditional political talk was seen as unseemly.
On Thursday night, after talking up his tariff plans, sharing his successes from his first 100 days in office and bashing the media, he returned to words of encouragement.
'Now is the time to work harder than you´ve ever worked before,' he said. 'Find your limits and then smash through everything.'
While Trump has described the speech as a commencement address, it is actually a special event that was created before graduation ceremonies that begin Friday. Graduating students had the option of attending the event.
Former Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban also spoke, regaling the audience with a story about visiting the Oval Office in 2018 during Trump's first term. Saban said Trump was a gracious host.
At a park a mile away, hundreds of people gathered at a counter-rally hosted by College Democrats.
One-time presidential candidate Beto O´Rourke of Texas and former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Alabama, addressed the attendees at their event, called a 'Tide Against Trump' - a play on the university´s nickname.
Trump´s presence also drew criticism from the Alabama NAACP, which said his policies are hurting universities and students, particularly students of color.
After his stop in Alabama, Trump is scheduled to travel to Florida for a long weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Later this month, he is scheduled to give the commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.
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