Trump finds a respite before a friendly crowd at Liberty University

Lynchburg, Virginia: President Donald Trump, a New Yorker who emerged as an unlikely champion for evangelical Christians last year, was rewarded with some sanctuary by the conservative faithful at Liberty University on Saturday after a brutal week in Washington.

Trump delivered his first commencement address as president to a Linus-blanket crowd of 50,000 at the university’s football stadium, delivering a pep talk to the graduates after scrambling to contain the political fallout from his sudden firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey on Tuesday night.

“Never ever, ever give up,” said Trump, who, since overcoming long odds to win the presidency, has mused about how unexpectedly difficult the job has been and how he misses his old routines.

“There will be times in your life you’ll want to quit, you’ll want to go home, you’ll want to go home to perhaps to that wonderful mother that’s sitting back there watching you and say, ‘Mum, I can’t do it’. Just never quit.”

Before taking off in Air Force One from the Washington suburbs, Trump told reporters he would move quickly to appoint a replacement for Comey, saying that “it’s possible” he could select a permanent leader before leaving for a long overseas trip Friday.

“We can make a fast decision,” Trump said. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, interviewed candidates on Saturday at the Justice Department.

Aides described Trump’s mindset over the last week as veering from aggrieved to defiant, and one warm-up speaker Saturday noted that Trump had publicly referred to how much he sacrificed to leave his luxurious private life for the toils of high-pressure public office.

To buck himself up, Trump ordered a laminated map showing his electoral support hung in the West Wing. Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, is in one of the reddest patches on that map, and the president seemed to relish mixing politics and piety, much as the school’s founder, Jerry Falwell, did, and as his son Jerry Falwell Jr., now its president, continues to do.

Getting elected, Trump joked, “required major help from God — and we got it.”

Standing in front of a sign that read “Champions for Christ,” a somewhat subdued Trump offered wide-ranging opinions on college football, Liberty’s founding and religion. But his most resonant moment came when he emphasised his emotional connection with an evangelical movement that was initially sceptical of him — scepticism that also took root at Liberty, where students in October protested the younger Falwell’s support for Trump.

The president cast himself repeatedly Saturday as an outsider battling the unfair and corrupt forces in Washington. But this message, a common campaign theme, was delivered in a way that struck audience members as more heartfelt, as he sought to connect his experiences with those of evangelicals in southern Virginia who view themselves as judged and shortchanged by elites like the Washington establishment.

“A small group of failed voices who think they know everything, and understand everyone, want to tell everybody else how to live and what to do and how to think,” Trump said. “But you aren’t going to let other people tell you what you believe.”

He added: “Embrace that label. Being an outsider is fine.”

Still, questions about the firing of Comey and provocative actions by Trump since then followed the president on his day trip. Trump — who confounded supporters and his own staff with his ever-shifting account of why he fired Comey, as well as his suggestion that he may have surreptitiously recorded their conversations — would not say who was on his shortlist.

The president said only that he was reaching out to “outstanding people” at “the highest level” who were “very well known.”

Potential picks include Sen. John Cornyn of Texas; the acting FBI director, Andrew G. McCabe; Alice Fisher, a Washington lawyer who ran the criminal division of the Justice Department in the administration of George W. Bush; and Judge Michael J. Garcia of the Court of Appeals in New York. They are all scheduled to be interviewed by Trump and senior administration officials, according to two officials.

The list also includes Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina; former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan; and Raymond W. Kelly, a former New York police commissioner. On Saturday, the FBI Agents Association, which represents 13,000 active and retired agents, endorsed Rogers, who once served as an agent in the bureau.

“They’ve been vetted over their lifetimes,” Trump said of the candidates.

Falwell called Trump his “friend,” and praised the president for “enduring relentless and often dishonest attacks from the media, the establishment on the left and the right, and academia.”

The crowd was a record, school officials said, and Trump rewarded his supporters with a flyover above Williams Stadium in Air Force One as people streamed out to their cars.

“We love setting records,” he had told the audience. “We love setting records because we have no choice.”