President Trump shared powerful remarks from the Rose Garden on Thursday afternoon, calling for an end to suffocating federal regulations that keep Americans from achieving their dreams.
The president took specific aim at Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, lampooning his time as vice president in the Obama White House.
"Our entire economy and our very way of life are threatened by Biden’s plans," Trump said, flanked by a blue truck and a red truck, symbolizing the heavy load of regulations associated with the Democrat's plan. Trump said the energy industry and the millions of jobs that came with it would suffer greatly under a Joe Biden presidency.
Biden has said in recent days that he intends to bring American jobs back from overseas and bolster the energy industry. Critics were quick to point out the Biden had previous vowed to terminate fracking, which would provide clean, natural energy and supply thousands if not millions of jobs.
"Thousand of companies, plants, factories would be closed," Trump said about the Democrats' plans to further impose "green," stifling regulations on American industry. "Under this dismal future, energy would be unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans. The American dream would be sniffed out so quickly and replaced with a socialist disaster."
The president also took specific aim at plans that the left has to impose housing regulations on communities in suburban areas, which could give preference to potential buyers and renters based solely on skin color. Advocates for these housing regulations argue that minority Americans are given less opportunity to live in the suburbs. However, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 specifically forbids "discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex."
"The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to at a much higher level abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions," the president charged. "Your home will go down in value and the crime rates will rapidly rise ... 'suburbia' will be no longer, as we know it."
"The suburb destruction will end with us," Trump said. The president also said that next week, he will be discussing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, which he and HUD Secretary Ben Carson have spoken out against several times since January of this year.
The Obama Era AFFH rule, critics say, instills greatly restrictive regulations on neighborhoods, towns, and communities and gives unreasonable stipulations for choosing potential residents by skin color. Further, the regulations that stem from the rule often promote further neighborhood segregation. The president first threatened to end the rule last month.
From the Rose Garden on Thursday, Trump also touted the nearly 800 regulations that have been suspended in the interest of fighting the Chinese Coronavirus and the subsequent economic collapse and dissolution of millions of American jobs.
We've taken 740+ actions so far to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response to the Coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/hUf0kq4NPi
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 16, 2020
Last month, the president signed an executive order tasking every local and federal government agency to review each suspension made in the time of crisis, and look at suspending them permanently. The president also took occasion to criticize the calls to defund police across the country, at a time where they are pushing to elect a Democrat who has vowed to raise taxes and roll out countless more regulations on working Americans.
"The prior administration piled up more than 600 major new regulations, a cruel and punishing regulatory burden that cost the average American an additional $2,300 per year." pic.twitter.com/9Mvlz1CFJm
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 16, 2020