President Trump was being “tongue in cheek” when he slammed Democrats who didn’t stand and applaud his State of the Union speech as “un-American” and “treasonous,” a White House spokesman said Tuesday.
The president was just trying to hammer home the point that there are positive things going on that all Americans should celebrate regardless of their party, spokesman Hogan Gidley told NBC News.
During a visit Monday at a manufacturing plant in Cincinnati, Trump blasted the Democrats who sat stone-faced before his address last week.
“You know they play games. They were told don’t even make a facial movement. So that means they would rather see Trump do badly, OK, than our country do well,” he said.
“That’s what it means. It’s very selfish, and it got to a point where I really didn’t even want to look too much during the speech over to that side because honestly, it was bad energy,” he continued.
“You’re up there, you’ve got half the room going totally crazy wild, they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country. And you have the other side even on positive news, really positive news, they were like death and un-American, un-American.
“Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not? [They] certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much,” he said.
The president’s comments came as the next short-term government funding bill is set to run out Thursday and lawmakers also must act by March 5 to keep protections for young immigrations living in the US illegally.