President Donald Trump railed that Democratic-run cities are “always dirty,” demanded that Columbus, Ohio, put back a statue of its namesake, and claimed Hollywood was once forbidden from giving Italian names to movie gangsters as he turned what was meant to be a speech marking Columbus Day into an hour-long meandering speech.

The president on Friday took a White House audience of Italian-American leaders through a litany of subjects ranging from Luciano Pavarotti’s fees, to the glass in the new White House ballroom and the gas prices Trump claimed to have seen in Iowa before the war with Iran.

“You go into some of these cities, without naming, because I’d like to see them come back, but they’re always dirty,” he said in the East Room. “You know, the sidewalks are disgusting, the streets are disgusting, they’re just in bad shape. The doors going into stores are dirty. Everything’s dirty. Smells, smells of marijuana and other things worse than marijuana. They’re all dirty. You know, it’s like the blue, blue-run cities. That’s where the crime is. Top 25. It’s all blue-run cities.”

By contrast, he claimed Washington, D.C., had gone “from one of the most unsafe cities in the country, probably in the world, to a totally safe city” since he ordered federal law enforcement — some with no training in street patrols — to begin accompanying local police and separately deployed National Guard soldiers with no law enforcement powers to the capital’s streets.

Trump, who claimed crime is “down 87 percent” because of his federal crackdown, said before he ordered a brief takeover of the D.C. police department last August, “kids would come in from Iowa to watch, look at the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, and they’d be killed.”

He further alleged that the National Guard troops who’ve remained in the city and are expected to do so until 2029 have “removed over 5,000” of what he described as “thugs” from the city, though he did not elaborate on how.

Returning to the event’s purported purpose of celebrating Italian-Americans, Trump noted that Italian-Americans had been “a very discriminated group” in the past and before implying that censorious liberals had tried to keep filmmakers from using Italian names for mobsters in their films because “they thought it was discriminatory.”

“They didn’t want you to call the name of the mobster. They didn’t want you to use the name of the, like, Alphonse Capone … you weren’t allowed to use Frank. You weren’t allowed to use Italian names, so the mobsters were named — one was Alan Jones. He played the role of an Italian mobster, but he couldn’t use the name like Vito. I won’t say Genovese,” he said.

“You know how many movies they made after that? About two, and they both failed.”

Although Trump implied it had been “woke” actors who’d complained about past mafia films, many objections to depictions of Italian-Americans as organized crime figures has come from Italian-American advocacy groups, such as in 1991, when the National Italian-American Foundation objected to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences nominating “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather Part III” for that year’s Oscar’s even though the directors of each film — Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola — were Italian-American themselves.

The president eventually pivoted to attacking Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, who leads Republican Mike Rogers in recent polls. Trump then falsely accused him of wanting to abolish the holiday and referred to him by the name of a dead Egyptian magnate whose late son briefly dated Diana, Princess of Wales.

“You know this guy? I call him Mohammed Al-Fayad. Some people call him Abdul. I call him Mohammed … somebody said why? I said I don’t know. I feel like it,” said Trump.

El-Sayed, a doctor and former Detroit health director, was born in Michigan to Egyptian parents. “He wants to abolish Columbus Day,” Trump continued. “He wants the, no reference to. Can you believe it? So we have people that, these lunatics that are running. They’re all against Christopher Columbus.”

New York City also came in for criticism over a city map of ethnic neighborhoods that lists Little Senegal, Little Guyana, Little Haiti and Little Yemen but no Little Italy. Trump called the omission “a disgrace” and said the city would not get “the billions and billions of dollars that they want to waste all the time” until it was corrected — even though New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani has already said the map would be updated.

Columbus himself got a fair amount of the speech. Trump said he had “resurrected” the explorer by putting a statue outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and that as a result, “I think I probably got close to 100 percent of the Italian vote. Can you imagine? And whoever I didn’t get, they’re in hiding.” Columbus sailed “with just around 90 men” and “an inaccurate map” through what is now called “Hurricane Alley,” he said. “So, if he would have known, he would have gone about 200 miles left.”

On Iran, Trump later said a “big announcement” on diesel prices was coming and that fuel costs “will come tumbling” once the war ends, “one way or the other.” He later admitted a deal with Russia for diesel imports.

He said he saw gas at “$1.95, and then I saw $1.85 a gallon” in Iowa just before the fighting started, and that “we’ll be down to those levels soon.” The national average in February was $2.94. He called the Navy’s blockade so tight that “nobody gets through,” then added: “It’s almost like if I gave Italians the blockade, Italians might even do it better. But you do it, you do it very violently.”

He brought up the comment that had dogged him all week. A nuclear-armed Iran “would have probably hit places like San Diego, Los Angeles first, because the route for a missile is much more convenient,” he said. “They have a lot of fun. They say, ‘Oh, you said they’re going to hit Los Angeles.’ Well, that’s the story.”