President Trump has had a tough week but was finally able to be among his fans on Saturday, when he delivered his first commencement address as president to an estimated 50,000 people at Liberty University. Trump, the divorced New Yorker who somehow became a champion for evangelical Christians last year, told students at the university founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell that they need to be more like him. “It’s the outsiders who change the world,” Trump said in a largely upbeat speech that was also defiant for the way he talked about his critics.
Although he didn’t directly criticize the media, or anyone else for that matter, he did say that “a chorus of critics” is only natural when you try to shake up a system. “The fact is, no one has ever achieved anything significant without a chorus of critics standing on the sidelines explaining why it can’t be done,” Trump said. “Nothing is easier or more pathetic than being a critic. Because they’re people that can’t get the job done.”
In his first extended remarks since Trump sent Washington reeling by firing James Comey from the FBI, the president appeared to be making subtle references to the controversy. “In my short time in Washington, I’ve seen first-hand how the system is broken,” Trump said at the school in Lynchburg, Virginia. “A small group of failed voices, who think they know everything, and understand everyone, want to tell everybody else how to live and what to do and how to think.”
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Trump also vowed that he would do everything to support religious freedom in public life. “In America, we don’t worship government, we worship God,” Trump said, eliciting the biggest applause of the speech in which he emphasized the importance of not giving up. “Never ever, ever give up,” Trump said. “There will be times in your life you’ll want to quit, you’ll want to go home, you’ll want to go home to perhaps to that wonderful mother that’s sitting back there watching you and say, ‘Mom, I can’t do it.’ Just never quit.”
Talking to reporters before the event, Trump said the new FBI director will be named quickly. He even raised the possibility that he could make the announcement before he leaves on his first foreign trip on Friday. Part of the reason for that is because the candidates are well known. “They’ve been vetted over their lifetime essentially,” Trump said. “But very well known, highly respected, really talented people. And that’s what we want for the FBI.”
