President Donald Trump continued his tour across America on Thursday, stopping in South Carolina to rally support for Republicans, specifically U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, who is in a tight race against Democrat Annie Andrews.
In what Trump said he thought was his 28th stop during his midterm tour, the president repeated his claim that he would give every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans maintained control of the U.S. Senate and House after the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Graham holds a 4-percentage-point lead over Andrews, according to the ECU Poll conducted by the Center for Survey Research at East Carolina University and released on Oct. 29.
In July, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham to the seat to fill the vacancy when her brother Lindsey Graham died.
Trump urged the crowd to continue supporting his administration’s agenda.
The president said the economy is booming, more car plants are being built in the United States than at any time before, and inflation over the past three months was 1.7 percent.
During the hour-plus speech, Trump told the crowd he considered renaming the Strait of Hormuz the Trump Strait, and pondered why so many presidents have done poorly historically in midterms.
And the president said he assumed Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota has to resign immediately for allegedly using a fake name to enter Congress.
Omar has responded to claims about her name. She responded on X on Oct. 23 to a post by Trump reacting to a recent Department of Justice filing that referred to Omar by a different last name.
“Whenever the news turns bad, this creep reaches for one name: mine. So let’s make it crystal clear. My name has always been Ilhan Omar,” Omar said.
Calling for more voter turnout, Trump has told supporters at his rallies to act as if he were on the ballot.
“We’re on the ballot, because they [Democrats] can destroy it,” Trump said on Thursday, listing his administration’s accomplishments.
Graham urged the crowd to vote for Republicans. “Staying home or voting for anyone other than the candidates on the Republican ticket is a vote for the radical Democrats looking to turn our conservative state liberal,” she said.
She also described Andrews as “the most radical liberal candidate ever to run for office in the history of South Carolina.”
Trump addressed his renaming of geographical features such as Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico.
“So we have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now I need an ocean and a river, so, and maybe a strait. I’m thinking about calling the Hormuz Strait the Trump Strait. How do you think the Arabs will feel about that?” he said.
Then the president said he thought about renaming a river and an ocean.
“So I like to think big. So the only two oceans that qualify are the Pacific and the Atlantic, so I was thinking about maybe I’ll go with the Atlantic because it’s closer to Washington. I was going to go with the American Ocean,” Trump said.
Trump said candidates seeking to be vice president or president should have to take cognitive tests because “we can’t go through another four years like we just did.”
“I took three of them,” Trump told the crowd. “Aced every single one of them.”
Trump also said it is abnormal that presidents, regardless of their performance, don’t do well historically in midterm elections.
“There’s something strange because if you’re president, Republican or Democrat, for whatever reason, you don’t win the midterms,” he said.
“I think it’s two out of 25 races, something like that … and it never made sense to me. Even if you’re a great president, it doesn’t matter. You just don’t.”
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