President Donald Trump welcomes conservative activist Hayden Williams to the stage Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Williams was attacked while recruiting at the University of California, Berkeley. Trump cited the case Saturday in announcing plans for an executive order to ensure free speech by students of all political viewpoints at colleges and universities.

OXON HILL, Md. -- President Donald Trump said Saturday that he planned to issue an executive order that would help guarantee free speech at colleges and universities by putting their federal aid at risk if they do not protect the viewpoints of students of all political stripes.

The president made the announcement during a two-hour speech to activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, but he did not provide any details about the possible order. Several White House officials did not respond to emails or telephone calls seeking additional information.

The White House did not respond to questions about when the president might sign the order.

The issue of free speech on college campuses has for years been a cause celebre among young conservative activists, who point to instances around the country in which conservative voices have been shunned by liberal students and professors.

Audience members, including many college-age conservatives, welcomed Trump's announcement, leaping to their feet when he pledged to hold school administrators accountable for ensuring that conservatives were permitted to express their views on campuses. The president cited the case of Hayden Williams, a young activist who was beaten up last month as he was recruiting for a conservative organization at the University of California, Berkeley -- long one of the leading centers of liberal academic thought.

"If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they've got to allow people like Hayden and many great young people, and old people, to speak," Trump said, drawing huge applause.

Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer, expressed concern about the president's proposed executive order.

"The visage of the most congenitally anti-free-speech administration in American history making a series of decisions as to which campus conduct is pro- or anti-free speech is more than alarming," Abrams said in an email Saturday afternoon.

Trump said the executive order would "require colleges to support free speech if they want federal research" funding.

The federal government distributes more than $26 billion a year to colleges and universities for research purposes, according to the National Science Foundation. The vast majority of that money is assigned to projects for the Pentagon, NASA, and the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and Health and Human Services.

"There's a history of the federal government requiring universities to do certain kinds of things in order to receive federal research funding," said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an associate professor of education at American University. For example, she said, the U.S. government imposes ethical guidelines on studies involving human subjects.

But the order could disproportionately affect private colleges and universities over public ones, Miller-Idriss added, because those institutions have historically enjoyed greater leeway to determine who may speak on campus.

"If I had to wager a guess at this point," she said, "I would say probably [the order] would be asking for private universities to follow the same kinds of things state universities have had to do, which is basically to say that if you rent space publicly, for example, you can't control who rents that space."

DIG AT MUELLER

Trump also attacked Robert Mueller's Russia investigation in the same speech, calling the inquiry "bullsh**" and claiming the special counsel was biased against him.

Trump's comments came during expectations that Mueller is wrapping up his investigation and preparing to send his findings to U.S. Attorney General William Barr within days or weeks.

"They try to take you out with bullsh**," Trump said of Mueller's investigation. The president reiterated his previous criticism of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he fired a day after the November midterm elections, calling him "weak" for recusing himself from Mueller's investigation.

Trump spoke of the "collusion delusion" and lashed out at newly empowered House Democrats who are opening new inquiries involving him.

"This phony thing," Trump said of the Russia investigation, "looks like it's dying so they don't have anything with Russia there, no collusion. So now they go in and morph into 'Let's inspect every deal he's ever done. We're going to go into his finances. We're going to check his deals. We're going to check' -- these people are sick."

House Democrats are undertaking several broad new investigations that reach far beyond Mueller's focus on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign.

Their efforts increased this past week after Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, appeared before two House committees and a Senate committee. In his public testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Cohen called the president a "con man" and a "cheat" and gave Democrats several new leads for inquiry.

Trump's campaignlike speech on Saturday touched on dozens of hot-button issues, including illegal immigration. The president accused "open border" Democrats of letting murderers, rapists and drug dealers into the country.

"They give us some very bad people -- people with big, long crime records," he said of Central American countries including Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. "Murderers. Killers. Drug dealers. Human traffickers. It's so sad to see how stupid we have been."

Trump defended his declaration of a national emergency to obtain wall funding beyond the $1.4 billion that Congress approved for border security. He said the order doesn't set a bad precedent for future administrations because Democrats are "going to do that anyway, folks. The best way to stop that is to make sure I win the election."

Trump also revisited his meeting with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, calling their summit "very productive."

He also addressed his remarks that he didn't believe Kim knew about or would have allowed the death of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who was held prisoner in North Korea, then sent home in a vegetative state. His remarks were widely criticized and led the Warmbier family to say they held Kim and his regime responsible for their son's death.

"I'm in such a horrible position because in one way I have to negotiate. In the other way, I love Mr. and Mrs. Warmbier and I love Otto. And it's a very, very delicate balance," Trump said.

More than two years after he took office, Trump once again insisted that his inaugural crowd was larger than his critics have admitted. He bragged about the state of the economy and denounced Democrats who he said supported socialism.

He denigrated the trade deals made by previous politicians and boasted about the tariffs that the United States had imposed on China and other countries. And he repeatedly mocked the "new green deal" offered by some Democrats, saying it would destroy the economy and take away people's cars and airplanes.

"Somebody described it as a high school term paper, written by a poor student," he joked.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael D. Shear of The New York Times; by Alyza Sebenius of Bloomberg News; by Kevin Freking of The Associated Press; and by Brian Fung of The Washington Post.

Photo by AP/JOSE LUIS MAGANA

President Donald Trump embraces an American flag Saturday as he arrives to deliver a two-hour speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.

A Section on 03/03/2019