“We’re okay now. We’re back. We’re back.”
The message President Donald Trump delivered to the oil and gas industry Wednesday when he stood in front of stacked oil barrels and spoke in Midland, Texas—heart of the Permian Basin.
Speaking to a crowd scattered with those wearing cowboy hats and face masks, he contrasted his policies from those advocated by presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden who has courted the far left-wing of the Democratic party. Biden’s supporters have advocated a hydraulic fracturing ban but he has stopped short of such a policy.
“If they got in, you would have no more energy coming out of the great state of Texas,’’ warned Trump, whose poll numbers for the 2020 election are lagging. He claimed the same, without evidence, for Ohio and Pennsylvania, two fracking states that also are battlegrounds in the presidential race.
The Associated Press reported the President took sweeping digs at “crazy left radical Democrats” on the trip Wednesday to the fracking fields of West Texas, launching claims that a Democratic administration would destroy everything from the country’s suburbs to the U.S. energy industry.
Speaking under a tent on a hot, windy day, Trump alluded to the opposing party in the most extreme terms, saying a Democratic White House win and the policies of the “Washington crazy left radical Democrats” would mean “the death of American prosperity. It would destroy our country.”
Trump also praised a step he took last week to rescind an Obama-era fair housing rule for low-income families, one that had Trump tweeting warnings to what he called the “Suburban Housewives of America.” “It’s been hell for suburbia,” he said Wednesday.
“They want to uproot and demolish every American value. They want to wipe away every trace of religion from national life. They want to indoctrinate our children, defund our police, abolish the suburbs, incite riots and leave every city at the mercy of the radical left,” Trump declared.
Trump was combining campaigning and fundraising in his first trip to an oil and gas rig and his first visit as president to the Permian Basin. He expected to raise $7 million, including $100,000 per person for one event.
Trump’s loyal donors and supporters in the oil and gas industry are dealing with the state’s fierce coronavirus outbreak and the boom-turned-bust of oil and gas.
Texas, over the past month, has experienced a dramatic spike in newly confirmed cases, hospitalizations and fatalities. The state became one of the nation’s hot spots as Texas politicians debated masks and other measures. The outbreak even impinged on Trump’s trip Wednesday, as an unexpected positive test result for the coronavirus kept Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who like Trump often declines to wear a mask, from joining the president’s flight. A Republican congressional candidate also tested positive.
Source: Associated Press
