President Trump preached bipartisan unity and the return of religion Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast at the U.S. Capitol.
“Today we join our hearts and prayers, recommitting to putting our country first, we have to put country first, making America stronger and greater and more exceptional than ever before, and we have to make religion a much more important factor now,” Mr. Trump said. “If we do that our job is just going to be much easier.”
“It unifies people, it brings people together,” he said. “Democrats are going to be able to have lunch again and dinner with Republicans.”
He told the Capitol Hill crowd gathered for the annual prayer breakfast, which presidents have attended since 1953, that “we all know what’s right and what’s wrong” and that lawmakers just have to “get together.”
He said they’ve shown it is possible with the Senate’s overwhelmingly bipartisan vote to confirm Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“It’s doable,” he said, adding that it was a “beautiful thing to watch” when the Laken Riley Act got passed with bipartisan approval.
The president also spoke about his executive order for a National Garden of American Heroes, which would house statues of American people of note, joking that he already knows which lawmakers in the room will have a statue there.
He spoke of the fatal collision of an American Eagle commercial jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter.
“As one nation, we take solace in the knowledge that their journey that night ended not in the cold waters of the Potomac, but in the warm embrace of a very loving God,” he said. “None of us knows exactly when our time on Earth will be over.
He also recalled the assassination attempt against him in July and said that surviving it “changed something in me, I feel.”
He joked that the bullet that grazed his ear at the rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, didn’t affect his hair.
“I feel even stronger,” he said. “I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it. Something happened.”
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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