Trump visits Ohio as part of victory tour

President-elect Donald Trump tours a Carrier plant Thursday in Indianapolis.
President-elect Donald Trump tours a Carrier plant Thursday in Indianapolis.

CINCINNATI -- Donald Trump, who is on what he calls a "thank you" tour, saluted his supporters in Ohio and made a surprise announcement that he will be offering the position of defense chief to retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis.

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Trump said he was supposed to unveil the nomination Monday. He jokingly warned the Cincinnati crowd to "not tell anyone."

Mattis retired as chief of U.S. Central Command in 2013 after serving more than four decades in the Marine Corps.

To get Senate confirmation to lead the Defense Department, he will need Congress to waive a requirement that defense secretaries must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years before taking the post.

[TRUMP: Timeline of president-elect’s career + list of appointments so far]

Arkansas' Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton had been in the running for the defense position.

The rally Thursday night in Cincinnati had all the hallmarks of Trump's campaign events. The president-elect took a veiled swipe at fellow Republicans. He remembered his general-election foe by joking, "We had fun fighting Hillary, didn't we?" He boasted about the size of his victory and repeatedly bashed the media.

Protesters briefly interrupted the proceedings. And the crowd chanted "build the wall" and "lock her up," referring to his Democratic opponent in the presidential race Hillary Clinton.

The president-elect had eased up on those campaign promises recently, suggesting that the U.S.-Mexico border wall could be part-fence and indicating no willingness to pursue criminal charges against Clinton.

The thousands who gathered downtown cheered Trump as he vowed to restore the U.S. to greatness, saying, "Now is not the time to downsize our dreams."

"Never again will anyone's interests come before the interests of the American people. It's not going to happen," Trump said. "The old rules no longer apply. Anything we want for our country is now possible."

Trump declared that "America will start winning again, big league." Reading from teleprompters, he spent several minutes touting his victory before outlining his economic plan.

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He held up his wins in Midwest states that normally vote Democratic, saying he didn't just "break the blue wall, we shattered it." He veered off-script to make fun of a protester, saying she was being ejected from the arena so "she could go back to Mommy."

He repeated his recent statement that, despite constitutional protections, "if people burn the American flag, there should be consequences." And he repeated many of his campaign promises, including a pledge to "construct a great wall at the border."

Trump, who has long spoken of feeding off the energy of his raucous crowds, first floated the idea of a victory tour just days after winning the election but has instead prioritized filling Cabinet positions.

He also is expected to hold rallies in Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and Michigan in the coming weeks, although details have yet to be announced. His supporters were thrilled that he had hit the road again.

"That he wants to do this, to take time out of his schedule to fly out here and personally thank the people ... shows what kind of man he is," said Josh Kanowitz, 43. "He's one of us."

But while Kanowitz largely praised Trump's initial moves as president-elect, he visibly recoiled at the suggestion that Trump might pick Mitt Romney as secretary of state, saying the 2012 Republican presidential nominee was "someone we should leave behind as we move forward."

Others at the rally also expressed some hesitancy at Trump's picks, with a few suggesting that choosing former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin to head the Treasury Department was not exactly fulfilling Trump's campaign promise to "drain the swamp" and eliminate corruption and elitism in Washington.

But most were inclined to give the president-elect the benefit of the doubt.

"He's a businessman. He'll pick talented people to work for him and then keep them in line," said Jaime Bollmer, a 28-year-old teacher from Lockland, Ohio. "He's a leader. That's what leaders do."

Stop at Indiana factory

The rally in Cincinnati was the second stop on a victory lap through the Midwest on Thursday, coming hours after Trump praised workers, factory owners and himself at a Carrier plant in Indiana.

There, he declared that a deal to keep the local plant open instead of it moving operations to Mexico was only the first of many business victories to come.

While focusing on the hundreds of jobs that he said he had saved from moving to Mexico, he also found time to talk about his primary performance in Indiana, former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight and building the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Some questions remain about the extent of the victory at Carrier, which announced this week that it will keep an Indianapolis plant open. In February, the heating-and-air-conditioning company said it would close the plant and send jobs to Mexico. Video of angry workers being informed about that decision soon went viral.

"I called Greg and I said it's really important, you have to do something because you have a lot of people leaving," Trump said Thursday about his call to Greg Hayes, the company's chairman, president and CEO. Trump appeared at the Carrier plant with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the current governor of Indiana. "You have to understand, we can't allow this to happen anymore with our country."

He continued: "The Rust Belt is so incredible but we're losing companies, it's unbelievable. Just one after the other. Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. It's not going to happen. It's simply not going to happen."

During the presidential campaign, Trump often had pointed to the plans to move the Indiana plant as an example of what he called poor policies from President Barack Obama's administration, and he pledged to revive U.S. manufacturing.

Trump said Thursday that he never really meant to promise that he would bring jobs back that Carrier planned to move.

"That was a euphemism," Trump said, meaning that he was using the company as an example of U.S. manufacturers that send jobs abroad. "I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in."

Officials said this week that Carrier had agreed to keep some 800 union jobs at the plant, but Trump suggested Thursday that it could exceed 1,100.

A call to a Carrier spokesman for clarification was not immediately returned.

Earlier Thursday, Seth Martin, a spokesman for Carrier, said the state offered the air-conditioning-and-furnace manufacturer $7 million in tax incentives after negotiations with Trump's team to keep some jobs in Indiana. Chuck Jones, the head of the United Steelworkers Local 1999 union that represents the workers, said the additional jobs in Trump's count were previously already set to be saved.

The state package

Carrier's decision is something of a reversal, since earlier offers from the state had failed to sway Carrier.

"The incoming Trump-Pence administration has emphasized to us its commitment to support the business community and create an improved, more competitive U.S. business climate," the company said in a statement Wednesday.

Carrier also said incentives offered by Indiana "were an important consideration." The state package, which is expected to be considered at a meeting of the Indiana Economic Development Corp. next month, includes grants for job training and tax incentives for additional investment in the plant, said John Mutz, chairman of the group's policy committee.

At the plant, Trump said he personally called Hayes, the CEO of United Technologies, Carrier's parent, to seal the deal, jokingly asking Hayes, "If I lost, would you have picked up the phone?"

The president-elect threatened during the campaign to impose tariffs on any company that shifted its factories to Mexico. And his advisers have promoted lower corporate tax rates as a means of keeping jobs in the U.S.

Trump repeated both ideas Thursday and dismissed the notion that a president shouldn't pressure companies to keep jobs in the U.S.

"They say it's not presidential to call up these massive leaders of business. I think it's very presidential. If it's not presidential, that's OK," he said. "We're going to have a lot of phone calls to companies that say they're thinking about leaving this country, because they're not leaving this country. Leaving the country is going to be very difficult."

Indiana's U.S. Sen. Dan Coats, a Republican, said the Carrier deal sent an important signal.

"Thousands and maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers woke up today and said, 'My gosh, he's not even president yet and he's figured out how to save 1,000 jobs,'" Coats said after meeting Wednesday with Trump in New York. "It symbolizes more to come. It's hugely impactful."

Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Lemire, Julie Pace, Lisa Cornwell and Brian Slodysko of The Associated Press; by Mark Niquette, Richard Clough and Kevin Cirilli of Bloomberg News; by Noah Bierman of Tribune News Serivce; and by Jerry Markon, Ylan Q. Mui, Katie Zezima, Max Ehrenfreund and Dan Lamothe of The Washington Post.

A Section on 12/02/2016

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