Donald Trump returned to Pennsylvania, telling his rally attendees that their state was critical to his ability to win back the White House and encouraging them to turn out to vote, though he also called early voting “stupid stuff”.
“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said, soon after taking the stage more than 45 minutes later than scheduled. “It’s very simple.”
Pennsylvania swung for Joe Biden in 2020, delivering its 20 electoral votes and helping Biden secure the victory in one of the few states that help decide US elections. This year, polls on average have shown Vice-President Kamala Harris with a slight lead over Trump – though the state is clearly in play, and both candidates are campaigning through it frequently in the final two months before November.
Trump has held his signature rallies significantly less this year than he did in 2016, Axios recently reported, which said his campaign promises Trump will ramp up the rallies in the final stretch. Earlier in the day, Trump listened to farmers talk about the problems they’re facing and boosted his ideas about imposing tariffs on foreign countries as a way to improve economics in the US.
While he’s on the road for large rallies less, he’s increasingly known for his frequent digressions, a longtime fixture of Trump’s speaking style that appear to be increasing this year. At the rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on Monday, he hopped around at breakneck pace and was difficult to follow. When coherent, he painted a dark vision of America under Democratic rule and starkly laid out what he would do if he won, including mass deportations.
Trump has started defending his meandering rambles as a storytelling technique called “the weave” – a sign of his oratory brilliance. Critics say his tangents about bacon sales or Hannibal Lecter, and his defense of them as intentional and smart, show a salesman trying to rebrand his disarray.
After starting on claims that Harris would turn the US into Venezuela at Monday’s rally, Trump then moved into “where they cure the tar”, saying: “For the environmentalists, you know where they cure the tar, where they take the tar and they make it into beautiful oil, Houston, Texas, and it all goes flying up in the air.”
Trump joked that he nearly called Pennsylvania a “state” rather than a commonwealth, saving himself from a gaffe that he claimed would invite negative headlines. He caught himself before calling it a state, though, because “I’m cognitively very strong.” He also called Harris “a very dumb person”.
“Winston Churchill was this great speaker – great,” he said at one point. “I get much bigger crowds than him, but nobody ever says I’m a great speaker.”
Despite his nonstop verbal wandering, he bragged about his lack of a script: “Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t have to use a teleprompter?”
He repeated a spate of false claims, such as that crime is up. Crime is down. He alleged he won the 2020 election by millions of votes. He lost. He wove an alternate reality where wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas do not exist because he had won in 2020.
He lashed out at Biden and Harris. He said he was again calling Biden “sleepy Joe”, regressing back to that insult instead of “crooked Joe” because he is not smart and is not acting as president any more. Harris, for her part, is a “very dumb person”, Trump said, and cannot answer basic questions.
He brought up a recent interview Harris did with Oprah Winfrey, who Trump claimed “used to love me until I decided to run for politics”. He said some people believe former president Barack Obama, who Trump called Barack Hussein Obama with an emphasis on his middle name, is leading the country instead of Biden. And he surfaced the unproven claim that Harris did not actually work at McDonald’s as a student, something that recently has irked him as rightwing accounts spread rumors questioning her fast-food work history.
“I’m going to go to a McDonald’s next week,” Trump said. “I’m going to go to a McDonald’s and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”
He brought up abortion, a key liability for Trump and other Republicans after the overturning of Roe v Wade. Several states have direct ballot measures that would protect access to abortion, and Democrats have made abortion access a major plank of the 2024 race. He praised the US supreme court for overturning Roe, saying the decision took “courage”. He added that there should be unspecified “exceptions” to abortion bans.
“That’s all they talk about. The country is falling apart. We’re going to end up in world war three, and all they can talk about is abortion,” he said.
The stop in the critical swing state comes after two assassination attempts, including one in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Trump will be returning to Butler in early October, some news outlets reported Monday. He displayed the immigration chart that he says saved his life from the Butler shooter during Monday’s rally, joking that he “sleeps with that page” at night. “Immigration saved my life,” he said.
Later in the speech, he again railed against immigration and migrants, bringing up towns that have received increases of people in recent years and saying those places are “lawless”, full of gangs and irreparably damaged. He promised that all migrant flights to Pennsylvania and elsewhere would be ended if he wins.
“You have to get them the hell out,” Trump said of migrants.
