CNN
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Donald Trump, who said Sunday in Pennsylvania that he regrets leaving the White House in 2021, plans to end his 2024 campaign the same way it started. It is a stew of violent and derogatory rhetoric and repeated warnings that if they lose, they will not accept defeat. come.
At a rally in a must-win battleground state, the former president told supporters that he “shouldn’t have left office” after losing the 2020 election. He called the Democratic Party “demonic.” He complained about new polls showing he was no longer leading in Iowa, a state he twice supported. And he said he didn’t care if the gunman who targeted him shot through “fake news.”
President Trump spent much of his speech promoting baseless claims of Democratic fraud in the 2024 election, even as polls show him and Vice President Kamala Harris in a deadlock nationally. , sowing doubts about the integrity of the election. He ranted about allegations of election interference this year and lamented his resignation four years ago after losing to Joe Biden.
“We shouldn’t have left. I mean, let’s be honest, we did very well because we did,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz. He insisted that it was now safe and said:
He regrets participating in the peaceful transfer of power after inciting his supporters to violently storm the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost but did not concede. It is unusual for President Trump to publicly admit this, and this is how he feels right now. He faces federal charges.
Trump, whose voice was hoarse throughout the speech, repeatedly criticized a new Iowa poll released Saturday night that showed a clear leader between Trump and Harris in the state. was shown not to exist.
“All this crap is happening in the media, with fake news, with fake polls,” Trump said, claiming that the Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll was published by “one of my enemies.” .
On Saturday night, the poll was a devastating blow to those in President Trump’s orbit, people familiar with the reaction told CNN. The former president has privately been furious about the numbers, claiming the much-anticipated poll should never have been released.
President Trump’s advisers have tried to assure him that the poll is not accurate, slamming it as irrelevant and telling him there is always one poll that stands out. His longtime pollster released a memo Saturday night claiming this was a “clear outlier.” But a gender breakdown that shows women are pushing the transition to Harris highlights the finding that Iowa women favor Harris over Harris, 56% to 36%. , privately worrying Trump’s allies.
At another point during the Lititz rally, the former president, who has been the target of two assassination attempts, suggested he was okay with gunmen gunning for him shooting “fake news.”
“We have this glass here, but really all we have here is fake news, right? And somebody’s going to have to shoot through the fake news to get me,” Trump said. . “And I don’t really care about that. I don’t care.”
A Trump campaign spokesperson said after the rally that the former president mused about how the media was actually protecting him.
“President Trump was saying that the media was at risk in that they were protecting him, and therefore the media themselves were at great risk and should have had a glass protective shield as well. There is no other way to interpret it. In fact, he cared much more about their well-being than his own!” Stephen Chan said in a statement.
Reacting to President Trump’s comments on Sunday, a senior Harris campaign official said in a call with reporters: “For President Trump, this election is really about his own grievances and not the American people. ” he said.
In his speech, President Trump said Democrats were “fighting hard to steal this damn thing” and baselessly claimed that voting machines would be tampered with.
“They’re going to say they’ve spent all this money on a machine and it might take another 12 days to make a decision. And what do you think will happen in those 12 days? What do you think will happen? ? said Trump.
The crowd shouted back, “Cheating!”
“These elections have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock Tuesday night. A bunch of crooked people, they’re crooked people,” President Trump said.
The former president’s latest threat concludes his campaign with one of the darkest and most threatening final messages in modern American history. In recent weeks alone, President Trump has doubled down on his pledge to use the military to fight the “enemy within” civilians, pretended to be a pro-peace candidate, and even pretended to be a pro-peace candidate. Former Congressman Cheney pondered how he fought. One of the most vocal conservative critics of the Republican Party, she was comfortable with a “gun in the face” in a combat zone.
This weekend was full of uniquely strange moments. On Sunday, President Trump told NBC News that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent post about X, which would remove fluoride from public waters if President Trump wins a second term, “is fine with me. I think so.”
“We haven’t talked about it yet, but I think it’s okay for me,” Trump told NBC. “You know, it’s possible.”
And the night before, in North Carolina, Trump laughed with satisfaction at an audience member’s suggestion that Harris might have worked as a prostitute. When Trump reiterated that Harris did not work at McDonald’s when she was younger, supporters in Greensboro chanted, “She worked on the street corner!”
Mr. Trump laughed, paused, and declared, “This place is great.”
As the audience laughed, he added: “Just remember that it’s other people saying that, not me.”
His reaction to this crude comment highlighted how the long-term spiral of corruption in American political discourse has spiraled out of control since Trump entered the presidential race in 2015. This is a sharp contrast to seven years ago, when John McCain’s supporters said: During a campaign event, when she claimed that Barack Obama had lied about his identity by saying, “He’s an Arab,” the then-Republican candidate snatched the microphone from her hand, and her rival said, “He’s from a decent family.” They are people (and) citizens, just like me.” We just happened to disagree on a fundamental issue.”
But even then, President Trump was lurking. He would soon emerge as one of the leading proponents of the “birther” conspiracy theory, a racist statement that Obama was not born in the United States.
In the run-up to this year’s election, President Trump used the former president’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to try to demonize him. He frequently misspells Harris’ first name before knowing the correct way to say it, calling her a “fucking vice president.”
Other times, Trump descended into farce. Last month, during a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he spent some time remembering the naked body of the late great golfer Arnold Palmer.
President Trump said, “Arnold Palmer was originally a man. In honor of women, I say I love women.” “I refused to say it because this guy was strong and tough, but when he took a shower with other pros and they came out of there, they said, I was like, “Oh my god.” That’s unbelievable. ”
President Trump’s messages to women, and more often to women, are also getting stranger. At a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last week, he told the audience that he had asked his aides to stop talking about being the “protectors” of American women.
“I was advised, ‘Doctor, please don’t say that,'” President Trump said. “Why? I’m the president. I want to protect the women of our country. Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
Recent polls show the former president trailing Harris across demographic lines among women voters by a wide margin. Neither President Trump nor his allies push back on those numbers, instead calling for more men to vote.
“Women are disproportionately voting early,” said Charlie Kirk, a leader of the right-wing group that Trump is tasked with running much of the ground campaign. “If the man is in the house, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.”
Ms. Harris has largely countered Mr. Trump’s dark proposals with promises to end the tribal conflicts that have defined much of the past decade.
“In our democracy, we don’t have to agree on everything. That’s not the American way,” Harris said in a speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., last week. “We like a good debate, and the fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them an ‘enemy from within.’ They are family, neighbors, classmates, and colleagues. ”
“It’s easy to forget a simple truth,” she added. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
The vice president has also focused on President Trump’s attacks on rivals and detractors, including his persistent insistence that he wants to use the power of the federal government to punish them. By contrast, Harris likes to say she focuses on policy, such as pushing to restore federal abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
“If elected, Donald Trump will walk into the Oval Office on his first day with a list of his enemies,” Harris said in Washington. “If elected, I will come with a to-do list full of priorities for what I will do for the American people.”
This article has been updated with additional reporting.
CNN’s Caitlan Collins and Samantha Woldenberg contributed to this report.
