Donald Trump attempted to reshape his campaign at a rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday after polls showed Kamala Harris taking the lead in the key battleground state.
But the former president quickly departed from a prepared speech on the economy and launched into personal attacks on Harris, calling her policies communist and fascist and accusing her of “laughing maniacally.”
Trump spoke to a nearly full house of 8,000-seat indoor arena in Wilkes-Barre, where some audience members walked out before the end of his speech, in which he focused on economic policy in a scripted speech. Some Republican strategists had hoped he could regain the lead by focusing on issues such as inflation, where polls show voters give him more credit than Democrats.
President Trump has blamed Harris as part of the Biden administration for the rising prices that have hit many Americans hard, calling the rising household costs a “Kamala Harris inflation tax.”
“She was involved in everything,” he said, trying to blame her for Biden’s policies.
Trump also likened Harris’ pledge on Friday to tackle high food prices by targeting food companies’ profiteering and to lower housing and prescription drug costs to the Soviet economic system.
“In his speech yesterday, Mr. Kamala has gone full communist,” he said. “Comrade Kamala announced that he wants to introduce socialist price controls, which you know have never worked before… It will lead to rationing, starvation and rising prices.”
The former president urged voters to ask themselves, “Would you be better off with Kamala and Biden than you were with Donald J. Trump,” and many Pennsylvanians may agree with him.
But its impact quickly faded as Trump again went off script multiple times with incoherent, often downright false, statements about everything from immigration to China to transgender people.
At one point, he even admitted that he had done so.
“People will say he was rambling. I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day I hit it too hard and people said he was rambling,” he said.
Some in the audience wore T-shirts that read “I Vote for a Convicted Convict” and encouraged Trump, chanting “Fight, fight, fight”, a reference to the former president’s words after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt last month.
Returning to his script, Trump criticized Harris for her past opposition to fracking — an unpopular stance in Pennsylvania, a major fracking company — but her talk of cutting spending on infrastructure projects like bridges and road repairs that have created jobs in the region won’t help in the Rust Belt.
Trump also challenged Harris’ legitimacy as the Democratic presidential nominee, calling it a “coup” against Biden.
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“Joe Biden hates her. This is the downfall of the president,” he said.
Trump seemed to argue that if Harris could become the nominee without a primary, then she, who is popular within the Republican Party, should be able to do so too, confusing some in the audience.
“I said, ‘Well, why are we having an election? They didn’t have an election. Why are we having an election?'” he said.
Trump described Harris’ decision to drop Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate as anti-Semitic, an apparent reference to debate over whether Shapiro’s support for Israel, including his past work at the Israeli embassy, would hurt the Democratic campaign due to the Gaza war.
“They turned him down because he’s Jewish. So they turned him down. To be politically correct, I wouldn’t say that. I could say they turned him down for a variety of reasons. No, they turned him down because he’s Jewish,” Trump said.
“And I’ll say this: Any Jewish person who votes for her or any Democrat needs to go out and get their head examined.”
All the while, Trump launched a string of personal attacks against Harris, including a bizarre remark about her laugh, which has proven particularly popular with many young voters.
“Have you ever heard her laugh? It’s a madman’s laugh. A madman’s laugh, a madman’s laugh,” he said.
