Trump lashes out at ‘dirty’ cities, claims Democrats canceled mob films in meandering Columbus Day rant

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President Donald Trump denounced that Democratic-run cities are “always dirty,” demanded that Columbus, Ohio, hand over a statue of its namesake, and claimed that Hollywood was once forbidden from giving Italian names to movie gangsters as he turned what was supposed to be a speech marking Columbus Day into a meandering hour-long speech.

On Friday, the president addressed an audience of Italian-American leaders at the White House on a litany of topics ranging from Luciano Pavarotti’s fees to glass in the new White House ballroom and the gas prices Trump claimed to have seen in Iowa before the war with Iran.

“You go to some of these towns, and don’t name them, because I’d like to see them come back, but they’re still dirty,” he said in the East Room. “You know, the sidewalks are disgusting, the streets are disgusting, they’re just in disrepair. The store doors are dirty. Everything is dirty. Smells, smells of marijuana and other things worse than marijuana. They’re all dirty. You know, it’s like the blue cities, run by the blues. That’s where the crime is. Top 25. They’re all blue cities.”

By contrast, he claimed that Washington, D.C., had gone “from one of the most dangerous cities in the country, probably in the world, to a completely safe city” since he ordered federal law enforcement — some without street patrol training — to begin accompanying separately deployed local police and National Guard troops, without law enforcement powers, on the capital’s streets.

Trump, who claimed crime was “down 87 percent” because of the federal crackdown, said before ordering a brief takeover of the Washington Police Department last August, “kids would come from Iowa to look, look at the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, and they would be killed.”

He further claimed that National Guard troops who have remained in the city and are expected to do so through 2029 have “removed over 5,000” of what he described as “thugs” from the city, although he did not specify how.

Returning to the event’s purported purpose of celebrating Italian-Americans, Trump noted that Italian-Americans had been “a very discriminated group” in the past and before insinuating that censorious liberals had tried to stop filmmakers from using Italian names for mobsters in their films because “they thought it was discriminatory.”

“They didn’t want you to call the gangster’s name. They didn’t want you to use the name Alphonse Capone…you weren’t allowed to use Frank. You weren’t allowed to use Italian names, so the gangsters were named – one of them was Alan Jones. He played an Italian gangster, but he couldn’t use the name like Vito. I wouldn’t say Genovese,” he said.

“You know how many films they made after that? About two, and they both failed.”

Although Trump has implied that it is “woke” actors who have complained about past mafia films, many objections to depictions of Italian-Americans as organized crime figures have come from Italian-American advocacy groups, such as in 1991, when the National Italian-American Foundation objected to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominating “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather III” for that year’s Oscar. that year, even though the directors of each film – Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola – were themselves Italian-American.

The president ultimately decided to attack Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan Senate, who leads Republican Mike Rogers in recent polls. Trump then falsely accused him of wanting to abolish the holiday and named it after a deceased Egyptian tycoon whose late son briefly dated Diana, Princess of Wales.

“You know this guy? I call him Mohammed Al-Fayad. Some people call him Abdul. I call him Mohammed…did anyone say why? I said I don’t know. I feel like it,” Trump said.

El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, was born in Michigan to Egyptian parents. “He wants to abolish Columbus Day,” Trump continued. “He wants, without any reference. Can you believe it? So we have people like that, these crazy people running around. They are all against Christopher Columbus.”

New York City has also been criticized over a city map of ethnic neighborhoods that lists Little Senegal, Little Guyana, Little Haiti and Little Yemen, but not Little Italy. Trump called the omission a “disgrace” and said the city won’t get “the billions and billions of dollars they want to waste all the time” until it is corrected – even though New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani has already said the map will be updated.

Columbus himself got a good portion of the speech. Trump said he had “resurrected” the explorer by placing a statue outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and as a result, “I think I probably got close to 100 percent of the Italian vote. Can you imagine? And the ones I didn’t get, they’re hiding.” Columbus sailed “with only about 90 men” and “an inaccurate map” through what is now called “Hurricane Alley,” he said. “So if he had known, he would have traveled about 200 miles.”

Regarding Iran, Trump later said that a “big announcement” on diesel prices was imminent and that fuel costs would “fall” once the war was over, “one way or another.” He then admitted a deal with Russia for diesel imports.

He said he saw gasoline at “$1.95, then $1.85 a gallon” in Iowa just before the fighting began, and that “we’ll be back to those levels soon.” The national average in February was $2.94. He called the Navy blockade so tight that “no one gets through,” then added: “It’s almost like if I grant the blockade to the Italians, the Italians might even do it better. But you do it, you do it very violently.”

He brought up the comment that had been nagging him all week. A nuclear-armed Iran “probably would have hit places like San Diego and Los Angeles first, because the route for a missile is much more convenient,” he said. “They’re having a lot of fun. They’re like, ‘Oh, you said they were going to hit Los Angeles.’ Well, that’s the story.