President Donald Trump held a Friday night ceremony honoring the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team and used it as an opportunity to escalate his messaging campaign surrounding the Minnesota Medicare fraud scandal.
Over the past two weeks, Trump has leaned into the scandal, in which dozens of members of the state’s Somali community have already been indicted, to steer the midterm conversation away from economic issues and back toward immigration.
Trump brought reporters into the Oval Office for the Friday event before going around the room and asking each member of the “Miracle on Ice” team to briefly speak.
More than half of the 20 players on the team were from Minnesota, which defenseman Bill Baker noted “doesn’t ring very well” with the president’s rhetoric.
“Any Somalians on the team?” the president asked with a grin, drawing laughs from the room. “I don’t think so.”
Trump briefly took questions after the event but largely stuck to the script. The most newsworthy instance happened before the Q&A when the team gifted the president with a replica of the cowboy hat players wore during the 1980 opening ceremony, which they all wore throughout the event.
Trump’s remarks can be seen in full below.
