Trump, 79, Tells Farmers He’d Rather Be Home Watching TV

President Donald Trump traveled to Wisconsin on Friday to reassure struggling farmers that he had their backs.

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But after bragging about his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, thirsting over a young male athlete and blaming NBC for the rain, the president said the quiet part out loud.

“I got elected. I’m here because I like the farmer. I mean, when you think about it, I guess there’s a lot of truth to that – I could be home right now at the beautiful White House, enjoying watching somebody else on television.”

The wild comment seemed to catch the farmers off guard, while Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins smiled awkwardly a few seats away.

Trump had traveled to Wisconsin looking for a political palate cleanser after one of the roughest weeks of his second term—a seven-day stretch packed with courtroom defeats, congressional rebellions, and even an apparent Oval Office nap caught on camera.

After being an hour late, he explained that he had done an interview with NBC and then blamed the network because it rained. He later praised speed skater Jordan Stolz, who won a gold medal at the Milan Winter Olympics—which Trump then took and wore—before bizarrely telling the audience: “I forgot to touch his leg.”

The supposed “roundtable” then went from weird to worse when the president introduced participants—and then told them to hurry up so he could leave.

“We’ll go pretty quickly because I have to get back to fighting a war in Iran,” he said.

“This is a hell of a speakers list, I might be here all night. No, if we can fellas, I gotta get back.”

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Trump was not actually going back to Washington after the event, with his schedule showing he was instead set to fly to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The visit to Wisconsin also came at a critical time for the president, whose approval ratings have tanked ahead of the midterms, both nationally and in the Badger State.

A new survey by Marquette Law School, for instance, showed that 42 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin approve of his performance while 56 percent disapprove.

Trump’s trade policies have imposed significant costs on American farmers, particularly through his tariffs on China.

One of the largest overseas markets for American farm products, it responded to Trump’s tariffs with levies targeting soybeans, pork, corn, and other agricultural exports, sharply reducing demand for U.S. goods.

The fallout was especially severe for soybean producers, and farm groups have warned that many producers were losing access to markets they had spent decades building.

To blunt the impact, the Trump administration rolled out multibillion-dollar aid packages for farmers.

“As president, I fought for the American farmer like no one has ever fought before,” he told them.