President Donald Trump went on a bizarre rant about his favorite $5 Sharpie pens on Thursday during his Cabinet meeting at the White House.
The president, 79, was rambling about a series of subjects as his top officials looked on when he looked down and picked up the pen near him with his makeup-plastered, bruised hand and began waving it around as an example.
Trump had been complaining about the cost of construction at the Federal Reserve building moments before.
“So this pen is very inexpensive, better,” Trump said. “Writes well. I like it.”
The president then proceeded to give a shout-out to Sharpie, the company that makes the pens he regularly uses and complained about the pens used at the White House.
“So I came here, and they have $1,000 pens. And, you know, you hand pens out, you’re signing, and you hand them out. You’re handing them as all these people. Sometimes you have 30, 40 people, and they are $1,000 a piece,” Trump complained. “Beautiful pen, ballpoint, $1,000. It was gold, silver, gorgeous. But I’m handing out to kids that don’t even know what they are.”
He went on to imitate a child, “‘What is this mommy?’” and vented that the kids don’t know what they are.
The president then declared “I love the government like I love myself economically. I want to save money.”
“So I’m saying this is crazy, and it had another problem: They didn’t write well,” Trump rambled. “So I take it, and I signed, and there’s no ink, and I got all you people looking, and you say, ‘there must be something wrong with Trump.’”
The president claimed that rather than using a $1,000 pen that doesn’t write, he called Sharpie and told the company he wanted pens, but he didn’t want them to say Sharpie as he was signing contracts as president.
“He said, ‘Well, I can make it nicer.’ I said, ‘What can you do?’ He said, ‘I’ll paint it black.’ I said, ‘That’s nice,’” Trump recounted his conversation.
He claimed that the person from Sharpie even said that they could paint the White House on it in gold, calling it “almost real gold,” and even suggested putting his signature on it.
The president then appeared to realize he was rambling and insisted that the whole tangent about the pen was not staged, telling the room, “I just saw the pen sit there. I thought that this is an example of how $25 million spent by me at the Federal Reserve building would be a better job than $4 billion that they’re spending.”
The president then momentarily went back to complaining about the renovations taking place at the Federal Reserve as the pen sat on the table in front of him.
But he wasn’t done talking about Sharpie, and picked it up again moments later.
“Just to finish on this one, so I told that story to somebody, who said, ‘Yeah, but I mean, but it’s not the same thing.’ I said, ‘You’re right. This one is better. It writes,’” Trump said, holding up the pen again.
He claimed that the head of Sharpie told Trump he didn’t have to pay for the pens, but he insisted he didn’t want them for free.
“He said, ‘What would you like to pay us?’ I said, ‘How about five bucks a pen?’” Trump recounted.
“Whatever the hell we agreed to, peanuts, as opposed to $1,000, and these were $1,000 pens, and we were given them out,” Trump kept going.
He then complained about people asking for extra pens and bragged about getting what he believed were “much better pens” than the ones going for $1,000, calling his Sharpies “hot as a pistol.”
