President Donald Trump took his time recounting his first year back in office at a news conference on Tuesday.
For more than 100 minutes in the White House briefing room, the president reflected on the past 12 months, touting the accomplishments of his administration and going on several tangents along the way.
He began with a quiet stretch where he held up mugshots of people he said immigration officers had arrested in Minnesota.
And as he went on, there were several unexpected moments, including an aside where he talked about baseball and mental institutions and another where he said he had wanted to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Trump. Several clips from the news conference went viral on social media, with some amassing millions of views on X.
The news conference came hours before the president was set to depart for Europe at a moment of international alarm. He has threatened tariffs on Denmark and seven other allies over their opposition to his aim of taking over Greenland. Tensions also remain high in the U.S. after the Trump administration ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to be ready for a potential deployment to the streets of Minneapolis as Trump has raised the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act.
Minutes into the news conference, Trump showed off a thick stack of paper with the word "Accomplishments" written on it. "I could stand here and read it for a week and we wouldn't be finished, but we've done more than any other administration has done by far," he said.
He added later: "It's big stuff too. We have the hottest country in the world."
Seconds later, Trump threw the stack onto the floor, where it landed with a thud.
While talking about his signing of an executive order "to bring back mental institutions and insane asylums," Trump began to reminisce about walking to Little League baseball with his mother in the Queens borough of New York City.
"I was quite the baseball player, you wouldn't believe," he said. His mother, he said, was "always there for me. She said, 'Son, you could be a professional baseball player.'"
He went on to say that he used to ask his mother why there were bars on the window of a nearby psychiatric facility. She told him it was home to "very sick people," he said.
He later said: "It wasn't normal, you know, you're used to looking at like, a window. But this one, you look at it, all this steel, vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place. Nobody was getting out. It's called a mental institution. That was an insane asylum."
At one point, Trump said he had wanted to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Trump.
"I was going to call it the Gulf of Trump, but I thought that I would be killed if I did that," he said.
He said he had "wanted to do it" even as his aides warned him against it. "I'm telling you, it's a good thing. And it'll be hotter than ever, I said," Trump said. "No, but I decided not to do that."
Moments later, he said he had been joking and suggested he didn't want headlines stating that he had wanted to call the body of water the "Gulf of Trump."
Trump said that people's "lovers" would no longer be killed in the streets of Washington, D.C., thanks to his crackdown on crime.
He said that "a lot of people in the media" thanked him for making the nation's capital safer.
"D.C. is now, you can walk right from here to a restaurant to right through the center of town," he said. "You can be with your child, with your loved one, with your lover. Your lover's not going to be killed anymore, so you can act like a real lover."
Toward the end of the news conference, Trump was asked about his belief that divine intervention had saved him from an assassination attempt and placed him back in office for a second time.
A reporter asked: "Looking back one year, do you feel like God is proud of the effort that you've put in?"
Trump replied: "I do actually. I think God is very proud of the job I've done and that includes for religion."