President Donald Trump’s time in office continues to be marked by the extreme. During one of his trips out of D.C. last year to appear before supporters, a local man stole a forklift and eventually confessed to having planned to flip Trump’s limo. That man — North Dakota’s 42 year old Gregory Lee Leingang — has now pleaded guilty to a federal charge of attempting to enter or remain in a restricted building and on grounds while using a dangerous weapon, meaning the forklift.
In addition to that, he’d previously been charged with attempting to damage government property, which was not reported as included in his plea deal.
He’s already pleaded guilty to state charges over the incident and currently resides in prison. Over a pair of fires he set the morning of the September 6, 2017, incident, he has been sentenced to ten years in prison, and for stealing the forklift and a separate case of burglary he’s been sentenced to ten more years.
His legal team has claimed that Leingang was suffering from a psychiatric crisis when he carried out the round of crimes last September. Just this past Friday, the suspect himself insisted to a federal judge that as a child, he’d been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder and had concurrently had a lengthy relationship with psychiatric medication.
The fires unfolded at the Bismarck Municipal Ballpark maintenance shop and the local state parole and probation office, and afterwards, he took the forklift but it got stuck in a gated area on the way to the president’s motorcade route.
He fled the scene but local police apprehended him.
U.S. Assistant State’s Attorney Brandi Sasse Russell has explained:
‘The intent was to basically try to get to the limo, flip the limo and get to the president and he wanted to kill the president.’
She says that considering the lengthy time behind bars he’s already facing from the state charges, she is considering having his federal sentence constitute time served concurrent to the state sentences.
That day back in September, Trump spoke at a local oil refinery about the then-still upcoming GOP tax plan that ended up constituting the first major legislative victory for his administration.
The plan slashed corporate taxes while providing modest relief for lower income individuals and kept the federal deficit ballooning wildly out of control and well on its way to the $1 trillion mark.
In the time since, Trump has claimed more tax cuts are on the way — but those did not materialize. Trump presented them as incoming at pre-midterm elections rally speeches when Congress wasn’t even in session.
In other words, the ridiculousness marking his time in office hardly stops with what unfolded last September in North Dakota.
He’s faced continuing rounds of protests, including some high profile huge marches in D.C., the repeated appearances of large balloons depicting him as a crying baby — and some viral incidents involving just single individuals, like the woman who flipped off his motorcade while it was traveling through Florida.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
