Donald Trump has made his first major Washington appearance since becoming president-elect, in a “victory” rally on the eve of his inauguration.
“Starting tomorrow, I will act with historic speed of strength and fix every single crisis facing our country,” he said.
“Every radical, foolish executive order of the Biden administration will be repealed within hours of when I take the oath of office. You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television. Somebody said yesterday, don’t sign so many in one day, let’s do it over a period of weeks. I said, like hell … no, we’re doing them tomorrow.”
The rally saw Trump review some of his election promises and campaign talking points, such as the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and the banning of transgender people from the military and sport.
“We’re not going to take it anymore… we’re going to restore patriotism to our schools, get radical left, woke ideologies the hell out of our military and out of our government, and we are going to make America great again.”
On the Jumbotron above the crowds, Trump played a video of a drill sergeant from the film Full Metal Jacket yelling at soldiers, confusingly interspersed with clips of drag queens and trans people labelled with the caption “the Biden-Harris military.”
As promised, the Village People joined him on stage for a rendition of YMCA to close out the rally.
Previously promised to enact trans ban “on day one”
The reintroduction of Trump’s military trans ban featured heavily throughout his campaign, with the president-elect telling a New Hampshire rally that he didn’t want to waste a “single cent to fund transgender surgeries or sex-change procedures.”
As many as 15,000 service members could be excluded from the military on the basis that they are “unfit to serve”.
A 2015 study found that of the estimated 1,300-6,600 transgender service members in the active component, less than 150 annually would seek transition-related care that could disrupt their ability to deploy.
The resulting estimated cost of extending transition-related healthcare coverage would increase by between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually, representing a 0.04- to 0.13-percent increase in active-component health care expenditures.
“With the stroke of my pen, on day one, we’re going to stop the transgender lunacy,” Trump said in another rally in December.
“And I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high school. And we will keep men out of women’s sports.”
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