Trump reacts angrily to claims he was ‘meandering’ at meeting with CEOs: ‘Bunch of BS’

Donald Trump has rejected claims that he delivered a “meandering” address to a gathering of top CEOs in Washington DC last week, citing a more supportive account of his speech on Truth Social that quotes an attendee branding the criticism a “bunch of BS”.

The GOP presidential candidate spoke to the Business Roundtable event on Thursday, the same day he met with congressional Republicans in private on Capitol Hill to rally the troops ahead of November’s election.

Discussing his appearance afterwards, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin said on the CNBC show Squawk Box: “I spoke to a number of CEOs who I would say walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish, or thinking that they might be leaning that direction, who said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map, and that they – which, may be not surprising – but was interesting to me because these were people who, I think, might have been actually predisposed to him and actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him, actually predisposed to thinking… ‘This is not necessarily,’ as one person said, ‘this may not be any different or better than a Biden thought, if you’re thinking that way.’”

A clip of Sorkin offering that insight was subsequently recirculated by the official Biden-Harris HQ account on X on Friday but the right-leaning Daily Signal has since published a story questioning his assessment, which was approvingly quoted by Trump in the post on his own platform.

“There was never a moment of meandering,” the anonymous attendee quoted by the Signal said. “He was focused. In fact, he received a loud ovation at the end.

“There was not one CEO who wasn’t impressed with what they heard from Trump.