Trump Repeats Absolutely Preposterous Claim About the Cost of Air Travel

President Donald Trump demonstrated on Monday that a wild claim he made in February about airfare wasn’t just a slip-up.

Trump took questions from reporters amid ongoing protests in Los Angeles County, where Trump federalized the National Guard on Sunday over the objection of California Governor Gavin Newsom. The state is suing the Trump administration over the move, which the president claims is necessary to quell civil unrest in the face of demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in the county.

The president took questions from reporters on Monday, when one of them asked if he would deploy the Marines to Los Angeles. (It was later reported that Trump would deploy 700 Marines to the area.)

“Mr. President, are you planning to deploy Marines in California to address the situation in Los Angeles?” she asked.

Trump gave a meandering response and took a detour to talk about the state’s high-speed rail project between Los Angeles and San Francisco. While doing so, he claimed that a flight between the cities costs $2:

We’ll see what happens. I mean, I think we have it very well under control. I think it would’ve been a very bad situation. It was heading in the wrong direction. It’s now heading in the right direction, and we hope to have the support of Gavin, because Gavin’s the big beneficiary as we straighten out his problems. I mean, his state is a mess.

And I’d like to get somebody involved in the rail because look, personally, it should’ve never been built because you can fly there for $2. And what are you doing? They’re doing that. You could drive, you could do lots of different things.

You know, if they did a study, if you gave every passenger the finest limousine service in the history of our world, the most expensive, chauffeur-driven white-glove limousine service back and forth, we would’ve saved billions of dollars as opposed to building this monstrosity that’s going up.

Trump repeated the same line about airfare while talking to reporters in the Oval Office in February.

“Nobody has ever seen anything like it,” Trump said of California’s high-speed rail project, which he has threatened to pull $4 billion in federal grants from. “The worst overruns that there have ever been in the history of our country. And it wasn’t even necessary. I would have said, you don’t buy it. You take an airplane – it costs you $2. It costs you nothing. You take an airplane.”

Watch above via NBC News Now.