Trump returns to his grievances for his closing argument

LITITZ, Pennsylvania — Donald Trump barreled through Sunday in a state of seeming rage from which nothing and no one appeared safe.

He said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in January of 2020, a remarkable admission from a former president whose attempts to cling to power led to a deadly riot at the Capitol. He suggested he wouldn’t “mind” if someone had to “shoot through the fake news” to get to him, an escalation of violent rhetoric that his team quickly sought to clean up.

He further worked to stoke fears about a rigged election in a county where some voter-registration applications remain under review for potential fraud. And he railed against “crooked” polls that showed warning signs for his campaign.

And that was all in just one rally, on his penultimate day on the trail.

It was Trump at his most aggrieved and discursive — he marveled at several points here that he had veered quite far off his teleprompter script — a window into the former president’s psyche in the final hours of his two-year campaign to retake the White House that he still, as he indicated Sunday, falsely believes was stolen from him.

Trump traded his blunt anger for a toned-down but still rambling campaign speech at his next stop in North Carolina. But his comments from Lititz were still circulating widely online.

“It is everything a Republican does not want to hear and everything that Donald Trump and his base wants to hear,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee. “Part of the reason why he’s running is his grievances, and it should be no surprise that that’s almost becoming his closing statement.”

If recent days are any indication, it is his closing argument — and his closing strategy.

Trump diverged almost immediately from his prepared remarks when he took the stage over an hour late Sunday morning at the Lancaster Airport in central Pennsylvania. He started by suggesting that taking days to tabulate ballots would open up avenues for fraud, in a retread of his unfounded claims from 2020 that were not upheld in court. He accused his opponents, without evidence, of orchestrating ways to cheat in this election. He called Democrats “demonic” and said his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, was nothing more than a “vessel” for her party.

Then, as he began discussing the enhanced security measures at his rallies following two apparent assassination attempts, Trump pointed out the panes of ballistic glass surrounding him at the outdoor venue and said: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news.”

He added: “I don’t mind that so much.”

His campaign soon issued a statement denying Trump was wishing harm on the media. Spokesperson Steven Cheung said Trump was “brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life … something that the Media constantly talks and jokes about” and that his remark about “protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else.”

Cheung claimed that the former president was implying the media was in danger and “should have had a glass protective shield, also.”

Later, as Trump criticized Democrats over border security, he lamented leaving the White House in 2021, in a seeming continuation of his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left. I shouldn’t have left,” Trump said.

The former president also promoted falsehoods about election issues that have cropped up in Pennsylvania as he and his allies continue to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of this election. Trump claimed there were fraudulent ballots found in Lancaster County, where election officials said they were investigating potentially fraudulent voter-registration forms. He accused Democrats of looking for ways to “cheat.” He complained that “we’re in court all the time” in Pennsylvania but that judges “aren’t particularly friendly” to the challenges his campaign and allies are filing. And he lamented that those raising alarms about real or perceived process issues, including himself, are being cast as “conspiracy theorists.”

“It’s a damn shame,” Trump said at one point.

By the time he hit North Carolina, Trump seemed at times to lose track of both which state he was in and what he was talking about. Speaking to supporters on an air strip in Kinston — taking the stage two hours late — Trump mistakenly suggested that Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick was in the crowd.

“We have great Republicans running, and you have one of the best of all right here, David McCormick,” Trump said. “David is here around some place, you know, we just left him. He’s a great guy.”

He also told a fictional story about the deceased Al Capone and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell having dinner together, and Lindell offering Capone pillows.

“If he didn’t sleep well because he didn’t like Mike’s pillows, Mike had almost no chance of living,” Trump said. “He would dispose of Mike somewhere in a foundation of a building or something. You would never see Mike again. Mike does not want to have dinner with Scarface.”

Even the crowd in Kinston seemed confused at a number of Trump’s remarks — mainly drawing applause only when he returned to his scripted speech about his policy goals. And Trump’s voice seemed to be giving out throughout his remarks, after giving hours worth of speeches a day in the final stretch.

Trump’s rants came on the heels of a spate of polls released over the past 24 hours that have carried contradictory messages for the former president. The final Des Moines Register poll by the much-venerated pollster J. Ann Selzer showed Trump 3 percentage points behind his rival in Iowa, a state that did not look to be competitive this year. It also found Harris leading by wide margins among women — a group Trump has long struggled with — and holding an advantage with seniors, a group that typically breaks for Republicans.

The last slate of New York Times/Siena College battleground surveys, meanwhile, found Trump leading in Arizona and Michigan and tied with Harris in Pennsylvania, but trailing in Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina — a state he is sinking more effort into in this final weekend than all-important Pennsylvania.

Trump’s campaign dismissed the Iowa poll as an “outlier” and accused the New York Times of driving a “voter suppression narrative” against the former president’s supporters. Trump slammed “one of my enemies” for putting out the Iowa poll and declared he’s “not down” in the state. He cast polling more broadly as “corrupt.”

His supporters in the crowd in Pennsylvania broadly said in interviews that they did not believe polls that show him tied with Harris here. They claimed, based on crowd sizes at his rallies, that Trump would win the state — and that the empty spaces at his event were because the mid-morning rally conflicted with church.

Trump repeatedly acknowledged — and seemed to relish — how widely he had veered off script in his Pennsylvania rally. “I love being off these stupid teleprompters, because the truth comes out,” he said at one point.

At another, he attempted to preempt media reports of his “rambling” by urging his supporters to say his speech was “brilliant.”

He added: “please.”