President Donald Trump gave a speech on infrastructure to a crowd in Ohio Thursday afternoon and touched on a topic close to the audience’s heart.
Trump harkened back to one of his first acts as president, green-lighting the Keystone Access Pipeline, which had been held up for years by the Obama administration.
“So many of these projects were just dead, dead projects,” Trump said, “Like the Keystone pipeline. It was dead. It wasn’t going anywhere. Hillary wasn’t going to approve it. It was a dead project.”
Before the pipeline was approved, large protesters gathered in it’s proposed path in 2016 in North Dakota. The encampment halted the construction of the pipeline until Trump’s thumbs up, and authorities began moving the protesters away from the makeshift camp.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Scott Olson/Getty Images
When the protesters were finally removed, they left behind mountains of garbage which had to be burned.
Stephen Yang/Getty Images
Photo by Stephen Yang/Getty Images
Photo by Stephen Yang/Getty Images
Trump brought this up in his comments today, saying “They left a mess, I have to tell you. You know about the mess? Became an environmental wasteland, what they left. You know about that? But I approved it and they left.”
The mess the protesters left behind cost more than a $1 million to clean up. The protesters also abandoned a dozen dogs as they fled the camp.
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