A year in his second term in office has done little to cool President Trump’s yen for settling scores with opponents, as he used a White House news conference Tuesday to lash his opponents left and right.
He slammed the prosecutors who pursued him over the period between his terms as “sick.” He said California Gov. Gavin Newsom had run his state into the ground.
He derided Leonard Leo, a onetime conservative ally, as a “bad guy” for helping boost legal challenges to the president’s expansive use of tariffs.
He reserved special vitriol for Rep. Ilhan Omar and fellow Somali migrants in Minnesota.
“I can’t stand her,” the president said of Ms. Omar, calling her a “crooked congressman.”
He complained that “she’ll come here, comes, and then she wants to tell us how to run our country.”
As for the Somali diaspora, he said they come from “the worst country in the world.”
“They just have people running around killing each other and trying to pirate ships,” he said.
The press conference was called to mark a year in office for Trump 2.0, and it turned into an epic hour and 40-minute review.
When a reporter asked Mr. Trump whether God would be “proud” of the past year, the president immediately agreed.
“I do, actually, I think God is very proud of the job I’ve done,” he said. “I think a lot of people are very proud of the job we’ve done.”
The president declared the year an unparalleled success, repeatedly said he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize and took stock of the economy, national security and changes at the border and in domestic policy.
He had kind words for some.
He had particular praise for Lee Zeldin, his Environmental Protection Agency chief, who he said has done “a great job” in reducing permitting times.
He offered words of condolence to the family of Renee Good, the woman slain in a confrontation earlier this month with immigration officers in Minneapolis.
“It’s a hard, hard situation. But her father was a tremendous — and [her] parents were tremendous Trump fans. That’s so sad. It just happens. It’s terrible,” he said.
He also struck a dissonant note on the shooting, saying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are “going to make mistakes sometimes.”
Most of his call-outs were to political and legal adversaries.
Mr. Trump labeled former special counsel Jack Smith, who won two criminal indictments against him — though both cases were tossed after Mr. Trump won reelection — as “a sick son of a bitch.”
He singled out New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and, in Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, as “sick.”
Ms. James pursued a civil fraud case against Mr. Trump, and the other two brought criminal charges. Mr. Bragg’s case resulted in convictions, but Ms. Willis’ never reached that point.
After mocking Ms. Willis’ name — “You can’t call her ‘Fanny,’ she doesn’t like it” — he decried disparate treatment.
“What they did to me, nobody ever went through what I went through, and here I am in a place called the White House,” he said.
Mr. Trump celebrated the departure from office of President Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who he said would have “destroyed” the country within a year.
“I mean, Joe was a disaster,” he said.
At one point, a reporter asked him about Mr. Newsom, a Democrat with White House ambitions who had jetted to Davos, Switzerland, to cheer on European leaders as they prepared to meet Mr. Trump for major international negotiations.
“Get off your knees and grow a spine,” the governor said.
Mr. Trump questioned whether the governor would be able to capture his party’s nomination and then said he used to have a good relationship with Mr. Newsom, but “somewhere we just went astray.”
“I just hate the way California is being run. We actually have people leaving. It’s never happened before, but I hate the way it’s being run,” the president said.
