Donald Trump said with two days until the presidential election that he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot, dredging up grievances that overshadowed his attack lines against Kamala Harris.
The closing themes of the former president’s campaign at a rally in Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania brought him full circle with his 2016 campaign that went after the news media and his 2020 campaign that was defined by his attempts to overturn the result.
Trump stayed on message for the first part of his remarks but could not resist reverting to resentments he has held on to for years, describing Democrats as demonic and lamenting the 2020 election – an issue that polls badly and his aides privately said they thought he had been convinced to drop.
“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off.
The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.
Trump at one point also praised himself for going-off script, a startling moment that reflects how he has become increasingly uninhibited, perhaps as the fatigue of doing multiple rallies a day has inexorably taken its toll.
Once Trump started on the 2020 election, he could not stop. He revived debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 and suggested anew that voting machines would be hacked, and efforts to extend polling hours in Pennsylvania – what his own team has pushed for – amounted to fraud.
Trump also spent time at the rally lashing out at a series of recent polls, notably a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa that put him four points behind Harris. Harris is universally not expected to win Iowa, but it could be indicative of her momentum in the final days.
“You really do inflict damage, like you do with this person in Iowa,” Trump said of the Selzer poll done for the Des Moines Register on Saturday. “It is called suppression. They suppress. And it actually should be illegal.”
The Guardian has reported that Trump’s aides are bullish on his chances, even though they concede they have no real idea how must-win states like Pennsylvania will break on election day. Part of the confidence is coming from internal polls that has Trump possibly winning five out of seven battlegrounds.
The trail of grievances extended to reviving an old favorite that he debuted when he was in office: castigating the news media and suggesting that he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.
“To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind,” Trump said from behind panes of bulletproof glass, as some supporters in the crowd laughed and jeered.
Hours after the rally, as Trump traveled to Kinston, North Carolina, for his second of three campaign stops of the day, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung claimed in a statement that the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.
“President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life, including one that came within 1/4 of an inch from killing him, something that the media constantly talks and jokes about,” the statement said.
“President Trump was stating that the media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said,” it said.
